I just got back from two days in Houston at EMC25, the 25th Annual Energy Marketing Conference. About 400 people, 60-plus speakers across panels and keynotes, a fastball pitch competition, and a useful set of hallway conversations.
Most of EMC25 was a working session on the same question, asked in different rooms: how does a REP or a broker actually run a competitive book in Texas in 2026? SB6, batch zero, 4CP, BYOG, hedge discipline, the renewal experience, the broker channel. The market is being redrawn in real time, and many of the playbooks that worked from 2018 to 2023 are getting stale.
Quick note on process before I get into it. I took a huge volume of notes across two days. To turn that pile into something readable, I used an LLM to help organize the notes and shape the structure of this post. The takeaways, the framing, and the opinions are mine. The AI helped me get out of my own way and stop staring at a blank page.
Here are eight EMC25 takeaways aimed squarely at REP commercial teams, broker portfolio managers, and anyone whose 2026 number depends on how this market evolves.
1. SB6 and batch zero are the new sales conversation
Texas Senate Bill 6 was the dominant topic at EMC25. The short version: ERCOT is dealing with an unprecedented surge of large load requests, mostly from data centers and AI infrastructure, and SB6 is the framework being built to manage it. The interconnection queue is now roughly 18 months from start to finish if you're lucky, and ERCOT is moving to a "batch zero" process to triage what's already in the pile, with biannual batch studies after that. Step one is a $100,000 fee for loads at or above 75 MW, $300,000 for loads above 250 MW. New entry rules, partial capacity allocations, and tighter project schedules are all on the table.
Cherie Fuller, Vice President of Customer Management at BP Energy Retail Company (formerly EDF Energy Services), framed the immediate impact bluntly on the SB6 panel:
"Uncertainty is always negative. It always creates risk and always makes prices go up. I don't want to risk my business and I don't know what's going to happen. In the long term, what we've seen through all the other regulatory moves is that everyone else would like to do the same thing as Virginia. It is likely that others will follow suit."
For REPs and brokers, this is the sales conversation now. Every C&I prospect with a multi-year contract coming up wants to know what SB6 means for their renewal, their capacity costs, and the pass-through language in their term sheet. A few teams at EMC25 already had a one-page SB6 explainer ready to hand to clients. My take: ship the explainer this quarter. The broker that hands a CFO a two-paragraph SB6 summary plus a "what changes in your contract" matrix is in a much better spot at renewal than the incumbent who hasn't scheduled the call yet.
2. Reframe price talk around the 5-component bill
A useful clarification came up across multiple panels: the headline rate on a commercial quote is not the rate. The energy component (the actual fuel cost) is one piece of a five-component bill: energy, capacity, ancillary services, TDU pass-through, and RPS / regulatory adders. The non-energy pieces, often more than half of the bill, are where SB6, 4CP changes, and new ECRS-style ancillary products are about to land.
Keith Poli, Principal in the Commodities Management group at Constellation Energy, made the point on the SB6 panel:
"The grid is changing with the growth in solar. It's the net load hours at sunset that really matter, not 3:00 p.m. You have enough solar on the system, but for reliability, do you have enough in the evening hours? And they're talking about going to a once-a-month, like 12CP or whatever they are now. California went to that."
Two things follow from that. First, brokers who cannot break out the five components on every quote are at a disadvantage to brokers who can. The customer can feel the difference: one quote reads like a price, the other reads like a strategy. Second, contract language has to handle regulatory change explicitly. Cherie Fuller made the same point about contracts: pass-through language built for today's tradeables needs to be expanded so the supplier can pass through what regulators add tomorrow. That takes a lot of webinars and a lot of customer education.
If your sales decks lead with cents per kWh, that pitch is from 2019. The 2026 version is "here is your bill broken into five buckets, here is how each bucket moves under SB6, and here is how our contract handles each scenario."
3. 4CP is moving, and demand response is the next product category
The classic 4CP construct, where a handful of summer afternoon peaks define a year of capacity charges, came up on multiple panels. With solar adding gigawatts of capacity, peak reliability is shifting away from 3 PM toward evening net-load hours. Panelists openly discussed a monthly CP construct similar to California's 12CP. Whatever the final shape, the strategy of curtailing a few August afternoons and calling it a year has limited remaining runway.
Jay Divakar, Head of Business Development at Kinergy (an Origin Energy company out of Australia, which runs similar markets to ERCOT), pushed past the policy debate on the same panel and pointed at the product opportunity:
"It's probably fair to say it's early days. One thing it's missing is, it talks about it as if it's controlled rather than optimized. So if you're looking at such large loads, why would you not optimize them rather than just curtail?"
The numbers tell the story. Of roughly 85 GW of dispatchable capacity in ERCOT, only about 3% actively curtails for 4CP today. SB6 is creating new DR programs designed for loads greater than 75 MW, with a residential DR product also in motion. That is a real product runway for any REP or broker willing to design a demand response product rather than a curtailment rider with three asterisks.
For commercial teams, the work is concrete. Redesign curtailment riders now, before the rule lands. Build a BYOG product (bring your own generation, behind-the-meter assets, batteries, gensets) that pays the customer for flexibility instead of taxing them for it. Train the AEs on the difference between optimization and curtailment. Constellation noted on the same panel that some customers have bad past DR experiences and are reluctant to participate again. The next generation of DR products has to address that.
4. Reliability has surpassed affordability for C&I
A consistent theme across panels was a shift in what large commercial and industrial customers actually buy. For years the answer was "the cheapest rate." That is changing. David Visneau, Chief Commercial Officer at Shell Energy Solutions, made the point on the Retail Energy, AI, and Market Dynamics panel: for large C&I customers, reliability has surpassed affordability as the top concern, and unmanaged scale destroys value in a market that still has room for retailers of every size. Renewables intermittency, data center load growth, and the recent memory of Winter Storm Uri have changed the buying criteria.
Frank McGovern of Clearview Energy framed the new normal on the same panel: hundred-year disruptive events are becoming more frequent, requiring businesses to be nimble, prepared, and diversified. Neville Ravji made the same point in his keynote a few hours later: "those black swans aren't black swans anymore; they're now gray swans."
For REPs and brokers, the implication is direct: sales decks built around lowest-rate-wins are not the right tool for the upper end of the C&I book. Lead with hedging discipline, financial strength, and how your team communicated with customers during the last few extreme weather events. The post-Uri reforms (lower price caps, eliminated unsecured credit, stress-testing) are working, but customers are scoring you on whether you take them seriously, not on whether the rules exist.
5. Hedge discipline is the product, not the back office
The hedging panel was direct. Sanjeev from ERCOT, on the risk management section, summarized it in two sentences:
"Hedge, hedge, hedge. That's number one. And number two, in my mind, the second point is very important as well. Do not piss off your state provider."
Sanjeev followed with the post-Uri reform stack: cap lowered from $9,000 to $5,000 per MWh, NPRR 1112 eliminating unsecured credit, NPRR 1277 fine-tuning EAL, weatherization inspections, and a stress-testing framework being prepped through the ERCOT stakeholder group. Close to a third of independent REPs were wiped out during Uri. The market is better engineered against the next one, and the goal is to be the supplier the customer trusts to ride it out.
Ravji covered the same ground as lesson four of his keynote: hedge discipline is buying low and selling high; it leaves money on the table most of the time, but on the day it matters, the unhedged supplier is the one chasing small profits into a wipeout.
Translate that to a sales motion. If your supplier desk cannot describe its hedge book in plain English, your AEs are at a disadvantage selling the upper end of the book in 2026. Hedging is a feature of the product, not a back-office line item, and your team needs to be able to talk about it the way a financial advisor talks about diversification.
6. The Texas Energy Fund and battery dominance reshape the supply curve
Procurement teams need to update their assumptions. The supply curve REPs hedge against is being redrawn by battery and solar additions, the $10 billion Texas Energy Fund's gas generation pipeline, and the demand-side response of the data center build-out. Summer peak pricing is shifting toward evening net-load hours. Volatility is concentrating in shoulder periods nobody used to model carefully. Constellation noted on the data center panel that ERCOT is seeing near-record lows on net load when wind and batteries are added in, even as gross demand surges, an unusual combination that breaks a lot of legacy hedge assumptions.
The standard "hedge a heat rate, sleep at night" playbook needs work. The shape of the load is changing, the shape of the supply is changing, and the ancillary stack that used to be a rounding error is now a meaningful cost driver. A REP pricing retail off stale wholesale assumptions will give up margin every month without knowing why. Reset the assumptions, document them, revisit them quarterly. The market is unlikely to settle down for at least the next 18 months.
7. The smaller REP that out-techs the giants wins, and the AI-enabled broker is right behind them
One useful thread at the conference was the broker-supplier dynamic and the role of technology. Consolidation is accelerating on both sides. A clear pattern came through: smaller and mid-sized REPs are leaning into technology (mobile apps, modern CRMs, AI-driven operations) to compete with larger, slower competitors. Customer experience expectations are not being set by other utilities. They are being set by Amazon and mobile banking.
Brian Hynes, formerly of Vistra Energy, covered the digital shift on the Retail Energy, AI, and Market Dynamics panel: app-based service usage at Vistra moved from roughly 17% to 85% over a few years. That is the benchmark. If your enrollment flow, support portal, or renewal experience is worse than ordering a phone case at midnight, churn is likely a bigger problem than the dashboards show. Darryl, a smaller retailer on the same panel, framed the other side: consolidation creates room for smaller companies to "run circles around" the larger, bureaucratic incumbents.
The AI use case that drew the most pragmatic discussion was not customer-facing chatbots. It was embedded decision tools running inside the stack, replacing the spreadsheets nobody wants to maintain anymore. Mike Perella, CEO of Enegy, opened his fastball pitch with a slide titled "the death of spreadsheets" and a one-liner the room recognized:
"You've got eight million formulas and they're always wrong."
The same compression is hitting the broker channel. On the AI-Enabled Brokerage panel, the consensus was that AI lets a small operator run a brokerage that previously required a hundred employees, with thinner margins to the customer and better margins to the broker. Andrew Meyer of Arbor argued the path forward is simplicity and transparency on rates: no teaser pricing, no hidden adders, no fine print at renewal. A data governance speaker on the same track reframed the role of data teams: data governance needs to evolve from a "Department of No" to a "Department of So" that enables secure access. For more on where AI is moving the needle for marketers and operators, see my piece on AI applications in digital marketing.
The benchmark for the smaller REP is not "good for a utility." The benchmark is Amazon. And the benchmark for the broker is "can a customer self-serve a quote in two minutes with the five components broken out?" If the answer is no, the AI-enabled broker down the street is in a strong position to take that account.
8. The customer renewal experience is the real product
The EMC25 keynote came from Neville Ravji, CEO of Sunrise Energy Holdings (the parent company of Budget Power). 23 years in retail energy across seven brands, millions of customers, and billions of kilowatt hours, including Tara Energy (sold to Just Energy), Discount Power (sold to NRG), and Valley Power (sold to NRG again). Two of the ten lessons in his keynote are worth pulling out for any REP commercial team.
The first is on adaptability, lesson two:
"Instead of trying to predict the future, We will just build an organization that is adaptable and can change as the market and the industry changes."
The second is on what customers actually want:
"The customer wants four very simple things. One: give me a fair rate. Two, don't shock me when I get my monthly bill. Three, don't screw me at renewal. And four, I'm not going to call you frequently, but when I do, pick up the damn phone."
No loyalty program in there. No app gamification. No tiered rewards. Four things, done right, every month and every renewal. That is the product.
For a REP running a book in Texas in 2026, point three is the operational one. Ravji was direct on stage about how Budget Power handles it: every customer gets a renewal rate equal to or lower than what a new customer in the same channel would pay. Charging existing customers more than new customers from the same channel is a primary driver of avoidable churn in retail energy, and it is the practice the next wave of customer-side platforms (Arbor, broker comparison engines, AI-driven shopping bots) is positioned to surface. If a renewal pricing strategy depends on customers not noticing, the churn curve is likely to widen as comparison shopping gets easier.
The fix is unglamorous. Build a renewal flow at least as good as your acquisition flow. Treat the renewal quote as a sales motion, not a back-office mailer. Track renewal NPS with the same discipline you track acquisition CAC. The REPs that figure this out before the comparison-shopping experience gets fully AI-mediated are in a much better position. The loyalty premium tends to be an expensive line item that doesn't show up directly on the P&L.
So what do REPs and brokers actually do with all this?
If I had to compress eight takeaways into one operating list for a REP commercial team or a broker portfolio manager: get fluent on SB6 and 4CP this quarter so it shows up in client conversations. Reframe every quote around the five-component bill. Build a real DR / BYOG product, not a curtailment rider. Lead with reliability, hedging discipline, and financial strength at the upper end of the C&I book. Invest in the customer experience layer, because the AI-enabled broker is going to. And fix the renewal experience before a comparison engine does it for you.
The Texas market in 2026 rewards what it has always rewarded: discipline, transparency, and respect for the customer's time. EMC25 reinforced all three. The teams that act on it now have a window to take share over the next two years. The teams that wait will likely spend the same two years explaining why the renewal book softened.
If any of these takeaways hit a nerve and you want to talk through what they look like for your REP or brokerage's marketing and customer experience stack, reach out through the contact form and I'll set up a call.
This recap is based on public panels and keynote sessions at EMC25 Houston, April 20-21, 2026. Quotes are from public sessions only and reflect speakers' views, not their employers'. I used an LLM to help organize my conference notes and structure this post. Opinions and takeaways are my own. Hero photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash.
