Reliability vs. Reality: Can the Grid Keep Up?

With strained supply chains, stubborn inflation, and the exploding demand from AI and data centers, the pressure on today’s power grid is unlike anything the industry has seen in decades. While solar, energy storage, and natural gas are all expanding rapidly, the question remains: are we building a system that can actually keep up?

 In episode 12 of Accelerating Energy, former PJM Chief Risk Officer Carl Coscia joins Sidley partner Ken Irvin to unpack the high-stakes tradeoffs between reliability and affordability. From volatile capacity markets to the rising cost of capital, they explore what’s really driving today’s energy crunch — and whether the solutions on the table are setting us up for resilience or risk.

 Executive Producer: John Metaxas, WallStreetNorth Communications, Inc.

Transcript

Reliability vs. Reality: Can the Grid Keep Up?

Ken Irvin:
Strained supply chains and unprecedented demand for electricity are putting energy companies in a bind. How do they keep power both reliable and affordable in these uncertain times without overtaxing our power grid? Recent data offers some insight. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, solar capacity is up more than 60 percent since 2023. Battery storage has nearly tripled, and natural gas is expanding again, with planned additions more than three times expected retirements, and we see coal-fired power plants are staying in the resource mix. What does this energy mix portend for the grid we’re building? Are we striking the right balance or locking ourselves into unsustainable pathways? We’ll explore that and more in today’s podcast. 

Carl Coscia:

I think we’re going to see investment. I think we’re going to see investment on the data center side. I think we’re going to see investment on the generation side, and I think, to manage it from an affordability perspective, we’re going to have to be creative.

Ken Irvin:

That’s Carl Coscia, most recently Vice President and Chief Risk Officer at PJM Interconnect. Carl brings over two decades of experience across commodity and financial markets. Carl’s worked at the intersection of risk, policy, and markets, giving him a uniquely comprehensive view of how our energy markets and systems operate. From the international law firm Sidley Austin, this is Accelerating Energy. We drill down on critical and late-breaking topics in energy transition and policy, and help businesses look over the horizon for what lies ahead. I’m your host Ken Irvin. Hello, and welcome to Sidley’s Accelerating Energy Podcast, Episode Number 12. Carl, it’s great to have you here today with us. Thanks for joining us as we continue to see the evolution of our energy sector in the year 2026 and beyond.

Carl Coscia:

Thanks, Ken. Glad to be here.

Ken Irvin:

Carl, before we dive in, tell us a little bit about your new venture Toller Energy. What are you aiming to build, and what motivated you to start it?

Carl Coscia:

Yeah. I think you summed it up a little bit at the intro. I’m a 25-plus-year veteran at an energy industry.

Ken Irvin:

You don’t look at day over 24.

Carl Coscia:

Thank you. Starting my career at Brattle Consulting, largely in the M&A group, and progressing to FERC and then TXU, Constellation. I left power and gas for a decade and went to oil and gas with Hartree Partners, and then I helped bring Hartree Partners into power and gas in the U.S. They had power and gas in Europe, but they didn't have power and gas in the U.S., so I helped bring them there, and a brief sojourn to Germany with EnBW, which was really eye-opening, and I think there’s a lot that we can learn from that experience, and then back to PJM at the time with Manu, and that was super rewarding.

But the reason to start this new venture now is, you know, the challenges that we’re facing, PJM’s in the spotlight of those challenges. You know, 13 governors signing a letter, the White House signing a letter, reliability being challenged for the first time, really, in PJM’s 95-year history in any real magnitude, but the challenge isn’t just PJM. The challenge is national, and what I’d like to do with Toller Energy is bring that experience, that global experience, to the broader group of people facing the same challenge. How do we integrate this new load? How do we meet the load? How do we continue to make the prices affordable for consumers? How do data centers find the right place to locate?

So, I just feel like the challenge is national or global, and I want to be part of it on that scale, and so, that’s why I’ve started Toller Energy. What is Toller Energy? It’s an advisory service. We’re working with our first client in PJM to kind of sort of bridge retail programs into the backstop auction. I anticipate doing a lot more of that, and they’re not looking for any money in the backstop auction. They’re just looking to find a way to manage the load with retail programs, and so, it’s exciting. I’m hoping to build a practice among people like yourself.

Ken Irvin:

Undoubtedly, you’re going to find a market with all that experience and know-how. There’s a lot in what you just said there, and I want to unpack some of that and talk about grid operations, talk about the situations we’re facing right now to get us into this. Reliability, PJM’s mission has always been about reliability, but we hear a lot about affordability these days, and which comes first? Reliability, affordability? How do you balance those stakes, and is this a time of crisis, or is this just more of the same old?

Carl Coscia:

I think it’s definitively different. We’ve never seen load growth like what’s being projected. You know, you look at Texas with the 350-plus-gigawatt-load forecast. You look at PJM’s load growth forecast, forecasting 25 percent load growth. So, we’ve never seen that before, so it’s definitely different. Is it a crisis? I guess it could be if we don’t manage it, but almost anything could be a crisis if we don’t manage it, and then, let’s go back to your first question, what comes first?

I’m going to make an analogy here. For decades, nearly two centuries, all the Federal Reserve concerned itself with was interest rates and inflation, and in 2009, we realized they needed to focus on unemployment, and Ben Bernanke, in his own words, title of his book, Courage to Act, had the courage to act and took a page out of Japan’s book and executed quantitative easing, and almost undoubtedly kept us out of a deeper recession or possibly, a depression. For 95 years, PJM’s sole focus has been reliability, and that, undoubtedly, has to remain its primary focus.

But now, the governors and the White House have said you need to focus on affordability, and that message, while being pointed at PJM directly, probably resonates around the country. So, similar to the fed, I think, we’re all going to need the courage to act to enable this technology, enable this load growth, which is, honestly, something this industry has wanted for a long, long time, but keep the product affordable, and so, I think, again, that’s the reason for me to branch out in the way I’m branching out now, is that I want to be part of that on a broad, national scale.

Ken Irvin:

Absolutely, it’s a national issue. Certainly, folks are locating data centers in my home state Virginia and then the PJM market, ERCOT, as you’ve talked about in Texas, but we know that it’s happening across all the U.S. markets, both organized and the non-organized markets. So, when we talk about affordability, when you say that there’s a focus even aimed at PJM about affordability, how do we manage for that? Are their market signals not working right? Adding 350 gigawatts of demand, sure, that is definitely a big number. Why isn’t supply responding, or is it a timing issue, like we hear about a lot?

Carl Coscia:

Let’s just unpack affordability, and I am a big believer that if you’re not a student of history, you’re destined to repeat it, and so, let’s just take a little bit of history… a moment to step back and think about some history. In the 2010s, we saw prices that were not completely dissimilar to what we’re seeing now. We saw 200 prices for capacity. We saw similar prices to this. We also saw the combined-cycle tsunami, which was the investment cycle that brought in a whole bunch of combined cycle units to PJM and allowed the retirement of a bunch of coal plants, and so, let’s just keep that in the back of our mind. What was going on right at that time that may not be going on right now?

And a lot of what was going on right at that time, and some of which is still going on right now, is the risk management around those retail prices was really functioning very well. PJM was posting its auctions three years ahead of time. They were run. They were almost conducted without complaint. The states were conducting their retail choice auctions, those that have retail choice, three years, two years ahead of time. Those were being well participated in. So, the hedging was really working at that time, and honestly, some of that hedging is still working today, and I think this isn’t really getting enough publicity or talk, so I’ll just throw it out here. If we just look at Winter Storm Fern...

Ken Irvin:

That’s the one earlier this year?

 Carl Coscia:

That’s the one earlier this year. Right, and honestly, it resulted in the largest billing week in PJM history, right? So, you would think if anything is going to create a problem for retail rates, it should be something like this, but it didn't, and honestly, Winter Storm Elliott before that also didn't, from an energy perspective. So, why didn't it? Well, 62 percent of PJM’s load is served by retail choice state. The other part is served by vertically integrated. Those retail choice states, if I just take the difference between the clearing price in their POLR auction and the day-ahead price, you’d get somewhere around 2.4 billion dollars that consumers were shielded from, and I think 62 percent of that.. Again, all the math I’m going to do today is going to be back-of-the-envelope math. So, if someone wants to quibble with it, you know, we can get into the nitty-gritty details.

Ken Irvin:

You’re a traitor. Your math inside your brain, back of the envelope’s going to be at least 100 times better than mine, even if I used a calculator.

Carl Coscia:

Well, I’m going to do back-of-the-envelope math a lot today, and so, if we think about that, 62 percent of that, you know, the week prior to the storm was an 800-million-dollar billing week for PJM. The first week of the storm was $3.9 billion, and the next week was $3.4 billion, and if we just difference those day-ahead prices from the clearing prices, a conservative estimate is consumers were shielded from 2.4 billion dollars in energy price volatility. So, that part is still working, right? Still working really well.

 Add to that number 62 percent of the 770 million, and you’re pushing 3 billion dollars in, effectively, retail risk management that consumers were shielded from. Add to that that our vertically-integrated states, a lot of them, are not pursuing rate cases, and you’re really getting a big consumer benefit, and that kind of shows the way for, okay, well, what’s happening in risk management on the capacity side? And you know, again, I’m going to take a step back here, but in 2018, we had a big dustup with the PJM Capacity Market with MOPR, and PJM didn't run auctions from 2018 to 2022.

And in 2022, when they ran their first auction, the first auction came out of the gate a little bit problematic, because they had the DPL South case that is still being litigated. The next auction was the ELCC auction and a nine times increase in capacity prices. So, what’s gone wrong with the risk management here, or what’s problematic for the risk management? If you go back in EQR pre-2018, you see capacity market hedges pre-2018. Post-2018, you see a lot fewer of them, but why was that? And some people might argue, well, you didn't hedge, so this price is the consequence of you not hedging, but 2018 to 2022 was a very difficult market to risk manage because there was no auction. So, that means if I sign a contract with someone, I don’t have a reference price to fix my floating leg against, because PJM is the reference price.

Let’s not forget, one of the primary things they do that enables risk management, that enables all of this savings is almost every price on Nodal, almost every price on Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) settles against the PJM price. So, when PJM doesn't post a price, it’s very difficult to settle bilateral contracts. You know, you’re just floating out there for years. Secondly, to be a capacity resource in PJM, you have to clear their auction. Well, in 2022, nuclear plants hadn’t cleared. You know, so nuclear plants weren’t cleared. So, who do you execute your hedge against? Like, who is guaranteed to clear? Who’s guaranteed to be able to be a capacity resource in that environment?

What do you settle your floating price leg against, and given that the SPP process for ELCC was extended, everybody knew the regime was changing, so how did they enter change-of-law provisions into their contracts that both sides feel comfortable with? You just had this really difficult hedging environment from 2018 until, basically, today, and I think that’s a big part of why we’re not mirroring the 2010s, why we’re seeing these prices and we’re seeing this impact being much greater, and we could go into retail rate making, but I think we would need a lot longer on this podcast.

Ken Irvin:

Yeah. That’ll be our next episode together. Yeah. Well, let’s take this in a slightly different direction here, because affordability is a big issue, but also cost causation, right? Like, even today, up on Capitol Hill, they’re talking about a Ratepayer Protection Act, and the White House, you referenced earlier, has got the Ratepayer Protection Pledge that was signed with the states and hyperscalers. On the other hand, there are folks out there who say, as we scale up, actual per-unit costs, end user costs, could go down. There could be, like, an increased economy of scale.

I heard a phrase the other day, data centers never sleep, right? The data system, the digital world goes 24/7, and so, that demand that we’ve been talking about is going to be there. It’s going to be around the clock. It’s going to be something different, but at the same time, I know, from what we’re dealing with, people are building powerplants. People are reactivating powerplants, finding new ways to make electricity. So, we seem to be getting just, generally, bigger. Maybe supply and demand aren’t going to be equally timed and matched and we’ll have some bumpiness, but if we look just past the peaks and the super peaks and we try and focus on affordability and cost causation principles, is this a manageable situation going forward?

Carl Coscia:

I guess I’m going to preview a little bit of who I am here. I tend to be an optimist, which is weird for a risk manager to be an optimist. Normally, you expect risk managers to be the no people, but I tend to be an optimist. So, my answer to that is I believe there’s going to be a way through this. That’s first and foremost, but let’s just think about this from a variety of angles, and you asked a lot of questions there. So, let me just start to unpack it a little bit. The idea of if we integrate more load, costs will go down, we’re hearing that from the generation sector. We hear that from the TO, transmission owner, sector, and that’s correct.

From a transmission ratemaking perspective, that’s correct. The more load you connect, the lower your per megawatt cost for transmission is. So, in that regard, that is 100 percent correct. You will lower the per-megawatt cost of transmission. Okay, well, how important is that? And again, I’m going to do some back-of-the-envelope math here, but a 10-dollar-per-megawatt hour decrease in transmission would roughly support an 84-dollar increase in capacity prices, leaving rates the same. Roughly. Roughly. I would've liked to have made that, you know, 10 dollars is 100 dollars, but at a 35 percent load factor for residentials, that doesn't quite work.

So, let’s just say it’s 10 yields 84. So, when you do integrate more load and you lower one price component, it allows you to increase the price component in another one. Okay, so, that's one. We can find a little bit more money without increasing rates, and that’s actually an important fact that a lot of people have said, but maybe that’s putting a finer point on it. I think the other thing we can do, and again, we hear this from a lot of sides. The average capacity factor of a combined-cycle plant and PJM is somewhere around 70 percent, and you know, we have, actually, very profitable plants running much lower than that. There’s 40 gigawatts of combined cycle.

If they could, theoretically, run at 85 percent, that's 6 gigawatts of generation that’s kind of sort of idle the majority of hours, and as we’ve heard, you know, you can fill those hours in by increasing more load. So, for 98, 99 percent of the hours, let’s say we could accommodate a significant increase in load. Not all of it, not all of the forecast, but some of the near-term forecast, we can accommodate it. So, then, how do we deal with those one percent, one and a half percent, two percent hours? That’s where there’s a variety of things in the near term. Peak shaving, distributed energy, batteries, maybe some added peaking capacity that could come online a little faster. All of those options are available and can be deployed relatively rapidly.

One of the things that you’ve often heard is...and I’ll just focus on PJM. That the queue was flooded with renewables, and renewables don’t really help. Well, maybe if we do some of the other stuff, that we can accommodate some more renewables, and again, like, let’s just break this down. I think you said solar was up 60 percent. If we could make solar plus a battery affordable at the prices we have...you know, PJM has 20 gigawatts of solar. You could turn the ELCC, which is currently around 11 percent… so that’s around 2 gigawatts of capacity, you could turn that more into 10 gigawatts of capacity if every solar plant had a battery.

Now, that’s, again, rough math, so don’t hold me to that, but we’re talking about just showing you that there’s opportunity there to increase the capacity by doing relatively incremental things that don't require changes in capacity interconnection rights and other things like that, and so, just on the short term, those are some easy things, but again, one of the key points I said was let’s assume we can make the batteries affordable, and one of the things that’s difficult right now is a lot of batteries in PJM aren’t quite penciling, and there’s a variety of reasons for that, but if you look at ERCOT, they’re flooded with batteries.

They’re just adding batteries right and left, and part of that is the volatility of their ramp rates and other things that batteries can come in and capture, they have huge extrinsic value in ERCOT. Okay, so, without explicitly changing the extrinsic value of a battery in PJM…and this goes for any new generation asset, and again, I’m going to go back to history. The late 2010s, where we had the combined-cycle tsunami, we’re hearing a lot of people talk about supply chain issues and other sorts of impairments that prevent investment in new generation.

But one of the biggest ones that jumps off the page to me is the interest rate environment. In the late 2010s, you know, pre-COVID, interest rates were almost at an all-time low, and we’ve built a very, very simple discounted cash flow investment model, and for every point of interest, for a gigawatt combined-cycle well located in PJM, we see somewhere around 300 million dollars of net present value for that unit. So, it’s possible to get closer to building at today’s prices, and again, we just saw FERC extend the price cap for two more years.

So, it’s possible to get closer to building at today’s prices if we can harness or challenge the interest rate environment, and you know, again, like, let’s go to Texas. ERCOT with the Texas Energy Fund, they’re doing just that, and they’re seeing build, and you've seen some cancelations in TEF, but you’re also seeing projects move forward, and if you compare that to RRI in PJM, I think if you were to pick which one worked better, you’d pick ERCOT. You’d pick TEF, and I think a lot of it is driven by that 3 percent interest rate.

Ken Irvin:

It sounds like you’re advocating we need more positive reinforcement, more positive feedback. Lower cost to capital is always helpful when you want to build things, but you compare the Texas market to PJM, it makes sense to me, based on the way energy prices clear and one versus the other. Batteries have more attraction toward ERCOT. I get that. There seems like there may be other positive reinforcements that could happen in PJM as well as the other markets that we’re talking about here, whether they’re organized or not.

Carl Coscia:

Yeah, look, I’m a positive reinforcement human. I believe people act more the way you want them to when they’re incentivized to act the way you want them to and not when you’re...

Ken Irvin:

That was one of my favorite things about you when you were at PJM.

Carl Coscia:

Thank you, and just a simple everyday life thing. You know, like, all of us drive cars, and all of us have probably had a speeding ticket or something.

Ken Irvin:

Well, speak for yourself. I’m not going to admit to anything here.

Carl Coscia:

Okay, well, I haven't had one in 30-plus years, either, but I admit, I’ve had a traffic ticket, but if you think about it, that’s a negative reinforcement, right? And for a lot of us, what happens when we pass someone, a highway patrolman or something? The first thing we do is look down at our speedometer, because we don’t want to get fined. We try to follow all the rules, but every now and then, a mistake could happen, and we don’t want to be fined. If that were reversed, if highway patrolmen handed out 100-dollar bills because you were driving exemplary, we’d go out looking for highway patrolmen.

You know, we’d be looking for state troopers and everything else, you know? So, I tend to be a positive reinforcement person, and even when I think about, like, the challenges of how do we get the data centers to bring their own new generation or do whatever we want them to do, how do we create an incentive for them to opt into whatever program we're offering, whether it’s through liability backstop auction or whether it’s something else? How do we incentivize them in ways where everyone could benefit, and how do we incentivize new generators to come in, you know, other than just simply competing on price?

Because price directly affects affordability, and I used to say, in the commodity market, competing on price is a sucker’s game. Like, I just want to compete on price. I want to compete on value, and so, when I was at Hartree, I tried to do everything I could to create value for my counterparts, whether that was matching their payment terms and minimizing their float or doing something else. I want to compete on value, and I want to incentivize them to transact with me, and I think that would be great if we could do that across the board.

Ken Irvin:

We’re going to do the mid-podcast break here, so take a breath. You’re listening to Sidley Austin’s Accelerating Energy Podcast. We’re Speaking with Carl Coscia, one of the industry’s leading voices on energy market risk and reliability, about the tradeoffs between reliability and affordability and what comes next for the industry. 

Carl, jumping back into this, as I think you mentioned, like, we are seeing more and more renewable resources. They’re intermittent. We talked a lot about batteries, but how do we actually measure reliability in seeing that increase as we’re going to get more and more data centers, right? How do we make sure that we’ve got the right timing, as this increase in demand confronts our market, as well as bringing the new generation, the bring-your-own generation requirements? Maybe say more about the positive reinforcements that you’d like to see there to incentivize that.

Carl Coscia:

I’m not going to pretend to say that I have all the answers. You know, I’d like to be part of the conversation, but I’m not going to pretend that I have all the answers. At PJM’s annual meeting… and for any PJM member, I encourage you to attend the annual meeting. I was going to host an investment panel, and now that I’ve gone, I think Stu’s hosting it, and he’s going to do a great job, Stu Bresler, but one of the questions I wanted to ask was, and we had a group of industry experts lined up to talk. Was if each one of them could tell me the one thing that was holding them back from their investment.

I think that would be a great place to start. Like, what’s the biggest hurdle to your investment? The other question I would love to hear is what’s the one thing I could give you that would make you invest tomorrow? What would be the one thing you need to invest tomorrow? I mean, hopefully, someone doesn't just say 1,000-dollars-a-megawatt-day price, because that’s kind of sort of the simple answer, which I get. It’s true. I would invest at 1,000 dollars a megawatt day, also, you know, given PJM’s energy market.

Ken Irvin:

We have to be realistic, though, right? It’s not going to work as a matter of the retail end users, right?

Carl Coscia:

Right, but if I’m an investor, I think whether I’m an investor in a load book or I’m an investor in a generation book, I think if I’m just thinking about PJM, what I would be troubled by or what I would try to get some risk management on is the volatility of returns, and I think just the volatility of returns, you know, investors don’t like volatility. Nobody goes out and invests in a stock that goes up and down, well, like a yo-yo or in a sawtooth fashion. Even if it kind of sort of sawtooths up in general, that’s a rough ride to be on, and if you think about the volatility of returns, like, let’s just go back to FERN, and let’s think about it from both sides.

On the load side, we had 770 million dollars in uplift, and for those retail choice states, those POLR providers, they ate that uplift, and there’s a fair number of retail companies that probably have negative earnings this year, just because of their portion of uplift. I know of a few, but I’m not going to name names. If you think about it from the generation side, just think about the price that has happened in PJM and the volatility of returns. We went from, in the 2010s, prices were pretty much routinely in the 100-dollar range, and they would bounce up to 200, and they’d bounce down into the 70s or the 60s, but in general, they were in that 100-dollar range.

And remember, there used to be a safe harbor in the PJM Capacity Market, and then they kind of went down into 30s again in that time period post-2018. They went down towards 30, and then they bounced up to 270. Well, that alone is a lot of volatility of returns, right? And then, add to that, that Winter Storm Elliott created a penalty for a lot of generators that didn't perform, and that penalty, before it was settled, was 1.8 billion dollars.

And a lot of generators lost a significant portion of their capacity revenue, and again, that’s just volatility of returns, and investors don’t like volatile returns. That’s the whole key behind the Sharpe ratio, is that you want to invest in the best risk-adjusted return, and so, if I’m an investor, the positive reinforcement I want is the lower volatility of returns. Now, one, again, way to do that, you can change the cost structure. You can change some of these volatile aspects of the PJM market. Those would be key points for me, and again, it’s worked before, so I think it can work again.

Ken Irvin:

I could go on for a long, long time with you, and I learn a lot every time I talk with you, Carl, so thanks for being with us, but looking ahead and trying to pick up on the choppiness you were talking about, I’m thinking of, like, stormy seas, right? Sometimes I ask what do you see down the road, but in your case, I’m going to ask what do you see over the horizon, as you’re sailing across these choppy, volatile, wavy seas here? What’s the best bet looking ahead? Is there a technology? Is there a market design? What are you looking for?

Carl Coscia:

Again, I’m an optimist, so I think we’re going to see our way through this, and I think it’s going to probably come from a variety of places, and that’s going to be some combination of near-term resources investing and longer-term resources investing, and we’re already seeing, like, the repowering of Crane Energy Center.

Ken Irvin:

Three Mile Island, right? The nuclear powerplant.

Carl Coscia:

Right, which is a very long-term, long-lived asset. We’re going to see things like that. I think, undoubtedly, as political tides ebb and flow, we’ll see renewable resources coming back in, and obviously, we see, in Texas, Texas is highly renewable and doing just fine. It’s got pretty good reliability, and in its last winter storm, I think that was a very… you know, since you made a sailing analogy, there’s a lot of, like, sailing that’s becoming more and more apparent in this energy market.

And that is, if you look at the last major winter storm in the last couple years in ERCOT, the first day, low pressure blew in, and the wind blew and blew and blew, and wind production was off the chart, and the next day, when that wind blew through, or maybe after two days...I can’t remember how many days it was, but then the high pressure blew in, came in. Sun was shining, and solar took over, and what they lost in wind, they gained in solar, and I think we're going to see some things like that.

I think we’re going to see natural gas saturation with hydrogen. We’re going to see maybe some hydrogen conversion. We don’t know when quantum computing is going to come in and even change the load that we’re expecting, and so, I’m old enough to remember peak oil, and in peak oil, everyone was saying our demand for crude is outstripping our supply of crude. We’re going to run out of oil. Well, we didn't run out of oil. We didn't run out of oil for a variety of reasons. We found the tar sands in Canada. Fracking became a thing in the U.S., and we became a lot more efficient at things.

And I think some combination of that is going to be the answer here, and again, I’m an optimist from a market design perspective. I think the backstop is a very interesting thing. I think it’s interesting because it’s targeting large loads, and so, I think, from a retail rate-making… and again, we’re not going to go into retail rate making, but I think there’s some headroom there, and I also think it’s going to spur innovation, like I said, on the retail side of, like, okay, well, how do I manage these loads? How do I manage them from a retail perspective? And so, if we’re going to end with another sailing analogy, I’m reminded of FDR, which is, smooth seas don’t make skilled sailors.

Ken Irvin:

Smooth seas don’t make skilled sailors? That’s a great quote. What does that mean here?

Carl Coscia:

I think it means, through adversity, you gain skills, and so, we’ve certainly got challenges. We’ve certainly got maybe some adversity, but we’re going to gain skills. It’s going to spur innovation. Just like every time we face the Malthusian paradox or a number of times we’ve faced the Malthusian paradoxes, we hybridize wheat, and we find an answer by hybridizing wheat. So, when I look forward, I think we’re going to see investment. I think we’re going to see investment on the data center side. I think we’re going to see investment on the generation side, and I think to manage it from an affordability perspective, we’re going to have to be creative.

Ken Irvin:

And that’s a great way to sum it up and wrap up our podcast. We’ve been speaking with Carl Coscia, former PJM Chief Risk Officer, who’s now launching a new company in the energy sector and looking at the path forward for the energy transition in a time of rising costs and debates about affordability. Carl, it’s been a pleasure. It’s been my honor speaking with you today. Thanks for taking the time.

Carl Coscia:

Thanks, Ken. Thanks for having me.

Ken Irvin:

Look forward to having you back, too. Hope that comes soon. You’ve been listening to Accelerating Energy. I’m Ken Irvin. Our Executive Producer is John Metaxas. Our Managing Editor is Karen Tucker, and our Associate Editor is Ann Margolis. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and thanks for listening.

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