(Houston, TX) – Saddle up, energy cowboys (and cowgirls, and the energy horsies too). It’s a jam-packed Thursday at CERAWeek by S&P Global, the preeminent U.S. finance and power industry conference that attracts thousands of executives for market-moving dialogues and endless trays of little treats.
Below, you’ll find the most notable and quotable stuff that your intrepid resident Factor This content director could gather.
This blog was updated throughout the day on Thursday, March 13, 2025, live from CERAWeek by S&P Global in Houston, TX.
The cost and benefits of solar
Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), offered her most pointed criticism of the Trump administration’s opinion on the importance of renewable energy. “I refuse this narrative that (solar) is an unreliable asset on the grid,” she told a breakfast session at CERAWeek by S&P Global Thursday morning.
The United States has celebrated some major milestones in the solar department recently, deploying a record 50 GW in 2024 and solidifying its first complete supply chain. “We are in the midst of history,” she added. “The challenges? We don’t always have the know-how to (manufacture components). A lot of that has been relocated to other countries, so we’re in the process of bringing that back.”
SEIA’s Ross Hopper on what’s going on in Washington: “We’re having a very lively conversation about this,” she summarized, mentioning the group of 21 members of the U.S. House of Representatives who sent letter to several Senators asking to keep Inflation Reduction Act tax benefits in place, a very popular topic at CERAWeek. “What’s happening in Washington and what’s happening in the marketplace sometimes feel at odds with each other,” SEIA’s president noted. “People ask me all the time, how do I feel? And I say I always feel some version of cautiously optimistic, informed optimism, totally devastated. It sort of depends on the day.”
Should the US make solar cells?
Martin DeBono, president, GAF Energy, Standard Industries, shared some interesting opinions on whether the United States should even try to manufacture solar cells.
“I’m not a huge fan of saying we need to build cells in the United States,” DeBono told CERAWeek attendees, pointing out roughly 80 billion solar cells were made last year, making them (more or less) a commodity in the market. “Solar cell factories are now highly automated. There’s not a lot of employment in the solar cell fab itself,” he added. “I think that for the United States and for green energy to continue, the U.S. really has to innovate.”
DeBono wants distributed generation to be more a part of the conversation around how we will meet impending load growth.
“Oftentimes DG, especially residential DG, is left out of the conversation,” he said. “We think about how we’re going to handle this massive growth of electricity needs- it needs to become a vital part, and the only way we can do it, in my opinion, is by creating innovative products that consumers actually want, not solar panels, that largely haven’t changed in the last 40 years.”
FERC Commissioner calls for more combined cycle gas development
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie addressed the CERAWeek by S&P Global audience Thursday morning, offering a rallying call for more baseload generation, particularly via combined cycle gas development. He gave a poignant example to support his reasoning.
“When PJM, the largest grid operator in America, hit their winter peak, the resources that were keeping the lights on and the heat pumps running so people didn’t freeze were 88% dispatchable, of which gas was 44%,” the FERC Commissioner recalled.
Commissioner Christie believes the United States is losing coal generation at an “unsustainable pace” given the other side of the equation, the increase in demand due in part to the growth of AI and data centers supporting the technology.
“You have to balance supply and demand every second,” he continued. “So what that means is you cannot run the grid and meet the need to balance supply and demand every second without dispatchable resources, predominantly gas, coal, or nuclear.”
“The grid doesn’t work on average load or average supply. The grid only works on meeting the peaks, and you have to have the resources to do that,” Christie continued, pounding a familiar drum that echoed throughout CERAWeek: the nonnegotiable, massive role natural gas will play moving forward.
“I think it was Churchill who said nothing concentrates the mind like knowing you’ll be shot at dawn,” he quipped. “When it comes to the reliability of the grid, we have a rendezvous with reality... What do we do about it? We have to build more baseload supply. It’s fine to add intermittent resources but we have to add generation resources that are not weather dependent.”
Commissioner Christie acknowledged that renewable generation like solar and wind will be quicker to get online in most places, confirming sentiments expressed by NextEra Energy CEO John Ketchum earlier in the week.
Christie on data centers: “A utility needs to build to serve load. Non-discriminatory. Whatever the load is, if the load comes, the utility needs to trigger. Whether it’s a data center, whether it’s a single residential customer living on a social security check, we need to take into consideration treating all the customers fairly. But in terms of data centers, if data centers come, wherever it is, we serve it, and we have to plan for it, and that gets back to the rendezvous with reality. The rendezvous with reality is, if we’re going to serve what’s coming, and it’s already (there) in Virginia, we have to have the generating resources to serve it, and that’s going to mean combined cycle gas.”
There’s not enough meat on Unicorns to feed data centers
AI is coming, and we need to be ready.
That was the theme of a poignant conversation about how we can prepare for the electric load growth necessitated by the proliferation of data centers.
“There are many challenges. Some are new, somewhat not new, like the aging grid” observed Mario Azar, chairman and CEO of Black & Veatch.
“There’s far more demand that is anticipated than capacity available by any turbine manufacturer or transformer manufacturer,” Azar shared. “And in our case, we do the design and construction, and skilled labor is a challenge right now… I think the industry together could figure it out. To me, it goes back to planning. If we plan, we could prepare and address these challenges.”
Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, believes an “all-of-the-above” solution is the only path forward, a common sentiment on his panel. Strazik offered some advice to his industry colleagues.
“We need to reground ourselves,” he told CERAWeek in Houston, Texas, Thursday. “For the better part of 25 years, at least with any power generation that we were adding, it was really a net zero gain… Gas was replacing coal, wind and solar were trying to replace gas, and it was a fairly flat system. The reality is this load growth that we’re going to invest into is enabling economics that otherwise aren’t going to come, and that changes the economic equation that allows us to make the investments in early technology that is going to be expensive.”
The first few of what we built are going to cost a lot, Strazik recognizes, which necessitates attention on proven technologies, in his opinion.
“We need to really focus on things that we can do at an industrial scale basis, and repeat and repeat and come down that cost curve,” GE Vernova’s CEO said. “This is not the time for unicorns. We have too much growth that needs to happen too quickly… It has to come with new technologies that we see a clear pathway, do the same thing over and over again, that allows us to get faster and more affordable at the same time.”
Will offshore wind survive in the US?
John Pettigrew, CEO of international energy provider National Grid, told CERAWeek attendees that people in the United Kingdom have grown to appreciate how essential grids are over the last 18 months or so. As for U.S. sentiment… Well, it has shifted a bit. Pettigrew put it nicely:
“It’s more focused on economic development and affordability, as well as energy security,” he opined. “There is just a different emphasis between sort of climate ambitions that the UK has, versus the federal government here in the US.”
Pettigrew is referring, at least in part, to offshore wind sentiment. He thinks it needs to be a part of the energy mix in the United States, despite what the Trump administration has seemingly decided.
“We’ve seen the executive orders in the US around federal energy for offshore wind,” the National Grid CEO said. “In the northeast, as you look at their plan over the next decade to address resource adequacy, they were absolutely reliant on offshore wind. So if that doesn’t progress, then clearly, they have to look elsewhere. They’re going to have to look to the west, and potentially, that creates opportunities in terms of one of the things that the US needs badly, which is inter-regional transmission.”
He said the challenges for meeting impending load growth in both countries include planning and siting. Pettigrew said it takes 10-12 years (or more) to build, and seven or eight years are spent in the planning process; he’d like to streamline that as much as possible.
“The second area, I’d say, is actually the supply chain,” he noted. “So it’s not just us in the UK, everybody worldwide looking to expand their transmission and looking to expand their transmission distribution networks. Therefore we’re heating up at the market.”
Pettigrew has seen long lead times on major transmission equipment, like many of his peers. It can take up to two years to procure some types of equipment from OEMs and seven years or longer for other gear.
“There’s just a lack of capacity in the world, and the (necessary) contractor skillset,” he stated. “You’ve got planning, you’ve got skills, and you’ve got supply chains. Those are probably the three big challenges.”
Pettigrew called out the importance of tech like LineVision, a piece of hardware National Grid is putting on lines in New York and in the UK to implement dynamic line ratings (DLR). Grid-enhancing technologies (GETs), he thinks, will play a critical role in the near-term future.
“Those types of hardware and software technologies, as well as AI, help us to think about how we can meet that interest in development,” he shared. “It’s all-of-the-above transmission.”
The National Grid CEO concluded with a call to action.
“We’ve lived in a world for 20 or 30 years where it has only allowed investment at the last possible moment, when it’s absolutely necessary. We need to get in front of the load growth. We need to get in front of interconnecting generation,” Pettigrew told the room. “And to do that, regulators need to have confidence that actually investing in anticipation of that need, because that need is going to come.”
Will AI Break the Grid or Grow it?
Maria Pope, the president and CEO of Portland General Electric, has some good news: She doesn’t believe AI will break the grid. “No. In fact, I think it will be enormously beneficial,” Pope told a crowd during a session about meeting demand at CERAWeek.
“What is really interesting to see with this rapid growth,” she offered, “is the opportunity to invest in infrastructure that we have not invested in ages. Our industry, for the last couple of decades, has really not grown. And there are very few industries that can actually do as well as the utility industry, without growth for a couple of decades, and now we have an opportunity for growth that we could not have imagined even just a few years ago, and the ability to invest is smart new infrastructure as we move forward that is ever-increasing.”
Bobby Hollis, who formerly worked on the utility side of the fence and is now vice president of energy cloud operations and innovation at Microsoft, gave his major takeaway from his week in Houston, Texas, chatting with global energy and finance leaders.
“Last year, I think there was the realization here of seeing that low growth and figuring out how to address it, and maybe questions about whether we could,” he recalled. “This year, I don’t see that. I see utilities and energy providers really kind of rising to the moment.”
Hollis pointed out that the energy world is one of the most data-intense sectors in the economy and getting more intense by the day.
“This is where you see the opportunity for AI to really play that momentum tool, because a lot of the aspects of how we still do grid planning are very much predicated on some of the decades-old approaches that we had,” the Microsoft VP said. “(Now) all customers that can participate in the actual energy sector.”
Pope called out the importance of initiatives like EPRI’s work on DCFlex in bringing together hyperscalers and utilities to work on interoperability to synergize their businesses. She is confident that new technologies can modernize the heavily hydro-reliant Pacific Northwest power system.
“Our region is pretty tech forward, and so we’re looking at new technologies,” she acknowledged, sharing her company is deploying 500 megawatts of battery energy storage and DLRs at scale. “We also have software tools that are helping us integrate all of these technologies forward on top of what is a really strong legacy platform.”
“I think this is a real moment in time for industries to think about how they’re going to interact with the grid,” Pope added. “One of the things that’s interesting about hyperscalers is they’re a tremendous source of backup generation and a strategy of ours for the last five or six years has been having 25% of the capacity in our system coming from the distribution system… If we combine that with clean energy goals and the intermittency of wind, solar, and even hydro during drought periods of time, that backup generation can really be used to enhance the grid. And I think that’s one of the things that’s really important, is that as we talk about some of these large scale projects, we need to remember that the grid is all interconnected, and it’s really one great big social machine of complexity and engineering that benefits everyone.”
One big machine, maaaannnnn.
Time to Power
Andres Gluski, president and CEO of AES Corporation, wants his colleagues to get real about the most important factor limiting new generation construction: time to power. He observes a four to five year wait time to bring a new gas plant online, while renewables can be deployed much faster.
“We need to have a reality check and not talk about this ideologically, but as business people and as engineers. What is the time to power?,” he suggested. “I think that reality is super crucial, particularly as a lot of this is not being addressed properly.”
Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of Edison International, was asked about the recent wildfires in California, promising to be forthright if Southern California Edison’s equipment is found to have been at fault.
“It’s a heartbreaking time in our home,” Pizarro confessed, sharing ways SCE is trying to help rebuild affected communities and steps the utility has taken to prevent similar instances. “We’re not sure yet if one of these fires was caused by our equipment. We think it’s possible. If we find that out, we will be transparent about it,” Edison International’s CEO assured.
Gluski, Pizarro, and fellow panelist Anthon Allard, EVP of North America at Hitachi Energy, all agree the grid will be exceptionally different in a decade. In many ways, it will be much more resilient and intelligent thanks to technological advances. California Edison is implementing AI to help with everything from dynamic line ratings to design, operations, and interconnection.
A major roadblock to meeting demand, Gluski suggests, is regulation.
“Let’s face it, regulators usually are, I would say, not known for not being innovative,” he told CERAWeek. “They have built their whole structure to be sort of failsafe. But to really solve this, we’ve got to go forward, and we have to be able to help businesses to prove to the regulator that this is better than the old model.”
Another obstacle in the way of progress, as iterated over and over in Houston this week, is a long wait time for critical power equipment. Allard’s company is the largest manufacturer of transformers not just in the U.S., but globally.
“Historically, we haven’t seen this type of spike,” Allard admitted. “So we don’t have the DNA, we don’t necessarily have the memory muscle to be able to deal with it, right? So this is new to all of us.”
Allard talked about billions of dollars of investments Hitachi Energy has made, including a huge sum on transformers and people to build them. “The trend is still going faster,” he shared.
Renewables Powering the Growth of Artificial Intelligence
Alaina Bookstein, energy and utilities at Amazon Web Services, believes generative artificial intelligence can aid AWS’ decarbonization goals, improving everything from carbon capture tech to material sciences and clean energy generation.
“We’re seeing the biggest cost productivity or flow improvements are in subsurface decarbonization and grid operations, and those hit every part of the energy value chain of energy,” she said at CERAWeek. “So it’s really exciting to see emerging business cases and opportunities for huge savings and productivity improvement.”
AWS is using AI machine learning in several unique ways, including predicting the weather at a solar farm in Arizona. Grid operations, via the optimization of real-time decisions, are a major use case, Bookstein maintains.
Dak Liyanearachchi of NRG Energy thinks Gen AI can aid productivity and help figure out an increasingly-complicated supply equation.
“Do we generate electrons? Do we buy electrons? How do we distribute electrons? It’s quite a complex piece of work,” he explained. “You know, what is it? Renewable energy? Is it gas-fired? What are the weather predictions looking like?”
Arshad Mansoor of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) said it was wishful thinking to assume we could reach net-zero with the technologies we have pre-Gen AI.
“We really start to start changing the narrative (of clean energy),” he suggested. “It’s a balanced scorecard and what technology and what systems you need. So in some regions in the US and outside of the US, you will see coal not being retired. And you may say, well, the sky is falling.”
Liyanearachchi recommended some short-term solutions to get more out of the grid we’ve got, while insisting we still need to build transmission to make the system work.
“Go to your phone and Google DCFlex,” he told the crowd. “You can get 15% out of the grid today… If you’ve got a transmission line, put grid enhancing technologies (GETs) and get 20% more juice out of it.”
Liyanearachchi admitted nobody knows exactly what power demand will look like in a decade, but an average prediction calls for four times more electricity usage than what was used in the last 10 years.
“Flexibility will help,” he noted. “All those things will help you build at least 2x; 3x or 4x (expansion of the grid) is not happening.”
Vincent Petit, SVP of climate and energy transition research at Siemens Energy, has been closely eyeing the 2030 load forecast. He foresees a 3x increase in data center electricity demand growth coming by then, most of it driven by AI. Globally, data centers currently use 2-3% of all electricity; Petit expects it to be 4-6% by 2030.
“Data centers are a challenge for the system amongst plenty of challenges,” he detailed. “The bottom line is it’s growing very fast… There’s going to be a race for the infrastructure to be ready (alongside) innovative solutions.”
“These aren’t challenges, these are opportunities,” chimed EPRI’s Mansoor. “I guess it depends on which side of the fence you’re sitting.” Mansoor told the crowd he’s trying to stay as optimistic as possible, purposely trying to avoid calling whatever lies ahead a “challenge.”
“If we ever know the power demand needed to make (Gen AI) applications happen, we’ll be wrong,” he joked. “Whatever we say, it will be wrong very soon… But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Build it, and we’ll find a way to power it.”
