• No silos - only connected power: the recurring theme was that energy solutions will only work when generation, grid, infrastructure, and policy all move together
• Even in discussions centered on gas and grid reliability, speakers returned to the same realizations - the economics of load growth and reliability are driving a broad generation mix, and because Louisiana's large energy users require power fast, renewables are increasingly how businesses meet energy goals while addressing urgency
• Louisiana's advantage is an all-of-the-above strategy that's driven by market demands - but developers and communities alike need clear rules of engagement and communication, not moratoriums, if we're going to rise to meet this critical moment

For three days, the Tulane Future of Energy Forum brought together more than 150 energy leaders, policymakers, investors, researchers and technology experts in New Orleans to talk about one of the most important issues facing Louisiana and the country: how we produce enough reliable and affordable energy to meet rapidly growing demand.

The theme of this year's Forum was “Connected Power: Connecting Leaders. Powering Progress.” It was an appropriate theme because if there was one message I heard repeatedly throughout the Forum, it was that our energy challenges cannot be solved in individual silos.

We need more generation. We need more transmission. We need natural gas. We need nuclear power. We need solar. We need wind where it makes sense. We need batteries, geothermal and emerging technologies. We need pipelines and other infrastructure to connect all of it.

In other words, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy.

Renewables Were Part of Almost Every Conversation

Considering Louisiana's traditional energy economy and that the major sponsors of the Forum included CenterPoint Energy, Entergy, Delta Utilities, BCP, LS Power, PHi Aviation, ENFRA, Jones Walker, Shell and Vistra, it was certainly not surprising that natural gas, LNG, pipelines, oil and gas infrastructure and traditional generation played prominent roles in the discussion.

What was more interesting to me was how often renewable energy entered conversations that were not specifically about renewables. Only a handful of panel titles specifically referenced solar, wind or other renewable resources. Yet, in virtually every session I attended, the need for additional generation and a diverse generation portfolio eventually found its way into the discussion.

That is important because this conversation is increasingly being driven by economics rather than politics.

Louisiana is experiencing extraordinary economic development and unprecedented potential electric load growth. Data centers, advanced manufacturing and other large industrial projects require enormous amounts of electricity.

Economic development is moving at light speed. Energy development is doing everything it can to catch up. I have stated repeatedly:

Economic Development Demands Energy Development. You Can't Have One Without the Other.

Renewables are part of meeting that challenge for two very practical reasons.

First, many of the companies making these enormous investments have their own energy and sustainability objectives. They are looking for access to renewable and lower carbon energy as part of the generation mix serving their facilities.

Second, and this is the big one, we simply need power. We need a lot of it. And we needed it yesterday.

Natural gas will remain critically important to Louisiana's grid. Nuclear has tremendous potential. New transmission is essential. Storage will play an increasing role. But when you look at the time required to develop different forms of generation, utility scale solar can be one of the fastest resources to move from dirt to power.

That isn't an argument against another generation source. It is an argument for building everything that makes economic and engineering sense. 

Commissioner David LaCerte: Reliability Requires More Resources

One of the strongest examples came during the opening keynote from David LaCerte, Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), moderated by Tulane University President Michael A. Fitts. Commissioner LaCerte repeatedly discussed the importance of an all-of-the-above approach to energy generation. One practical issue he highlighted was the lengthy backlog for natural gas turbines, which can stretch years.

That matters. We can support natural gas generation while at the same time recognizing that waiting years for equipment does not solve a power shortage that is developing today. That is where the all-of-the-above philosophy becomes practical instead of political.

If one resource takes years longer to deploy, then we should be developing other resources while it is being built. Solar, storage, transmission, natural gas, nuclear, and emerging technologies should not automatically be viewed as competitors. Increasingly, they are pieces of the same reliability puzzle.

Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan: We Need Solutions, Not Moratoriums

That same sense of urgency came through during the Power Prices, Data Centers, and the Future of Grid Affordability panel discussion that included Louisiana Public Service Commissioner Jean-Paul Coussan, Larry Hand, Vice President of Regulatory & Public Affairs for Entergy Louisiana, Joshua Hodge, Executive Director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Greg Upton, Executive Director of the Energy Institute at LSU. 

Commissioner Coussan’s comment that moratoriums on data centers are “lazy” and “intellectually dishonest” really stuck with me, and it points to a broader lesson. Louisiana has legitimate questions to answer: Who pays for the infrastructure? How do we protect existing ratepayers? How quickly can generation and transmission be built? What if projected load doesn’t materialize? Those questions deserve thoughtful answers.

But simply saying “stop” isn’t an energy policy, and the same can be applied to renewable generation. There’s an effort underway to impose a statewide moratorium on utility-scale solar. Louisiana has already built state siting and decommissioning requirements while preserving a role for local government. Rather than halting development statewide, we should let those rules work, address real problems as they arise, and keep improving the process.

Louisiana needs solutions that move responsible projects forward while protecting communities, landowners, and ratepayers. We can’t solve a generation shortage by making it harder to build generation.

Solar: Opportunity Meets Uncertainty

The panel Utility-Scale Solar: Challenges, Opportunities, and What's Next provided an excellent discussion of those challenges - and uncertainty was a recurring theme.

Grace Cammack, Vice President of Power Marketing for ENGIE North America, moderated a panel featuring Matt Kisber, Co-Founder and Chairman of the Board of Silicon Ranch Corporation; John Weiss, Vice President of Sustainability and Environmental Policy for Entergy; and Patrick Browne Jr., Managing Director at Marsh Risk.

Developers already face major hurdles—transmission availability, interconnection delays, and the MISO queue. Add constantly shifting federal policies, state requirements, and local ordinances, and financing gets harder with every change. These projects demand huge capital long before the first electron reaches the grid.  

Investors can price risk, but they struggle to price uncertainty. When the rules change after millions have been spent, the impact doesn’t stop at a single project—it influences future investment decisions. I’ve seen this firsthand working with Louisiana local governments and developers.  

Communities have every right to set reasonable development rules. Developers also need to know those rules up front—and trust that meeting them leads to actual construction.

Offshore Wind and Louisiana's Existing Energy Workforce

The uncertainty discussion continued during Offshore Wind at a Crossroads: Policy, Markets, and Louisiana's Future.

The panel included James Martin, CEO of Gulf Wind Technology; Louisiana State Representative Joseph A. Orgeron, Ph.D.; and Madelyn Smith, Program Manager for the Southeastern Wind Coalition. It was moderated by Will Baldwin, Partner, Co-Leader of the Maritime Industry Team and Co-Chair of the Offshore Wind Initiative at Jones Walker LLP.

Madelyn highlighted how shifting federal policy has affected offshore wind and how recent court decisions allowing some Northeast projects to continue underscore the stakes. Regulatory uncertainty is more than a question of whether a single project survives. It can raise financing costs, weaken supply chains, and push companies to redeploy capital. When that happens, talented engineers, technicians, and other specialists often move on to other industries.

Representative Orgeron made the Louisiana connection clear: regardless of where offshore wind electricity is produced, a significant portion of the economic activity required to build offshore infrastructure can be done here. Louisiana already has the skills, supply chains, and logistics - we have shipyards that build vessels, fabricators and machinists that produce components, marine operators that support offshore work, and ports that handle energy logistics. And as Orgeron joked, we even know how to keep offshore crews fed - and how do they love our Louisiana cooking!

In short, Louisiana’s offshore oil and gas industry didn’t leave us unprepared for the next generation of offshore energy. It helped build the workforce and infrastructure to compete. That’s economic development.

My Panel: Building Energy Infrastructure

I also had the privilege of serving as a panelist for Building Energy Infrastructure: Navigating an Increasingly Complex Landscape.

The discussion was moderated by Pierre Conner, Professor of Practice and Executive Director of the Tulane Energy Institute. I was joined by J. Warren Doyle, President of Doyle Land Services, Inc., and Kevin Taliaferro, Senior Director of Land & Right of Way for Energy Transfer.

We came to the discussion from different areas of the energy business, but we found considerable common ground - and again, the word that kept surfacing was uncertainty.

Energy infrastructure is extraordinarily capital intensive. Whether you are talking about a pipeline, transmission line, solar facility, wind project or another major infrastructure investment, the basic development process has a lot in common:

Need identified → route or site selected → land secured → environmental review → permits → cost allocation → financing → construction.

At every one of those steps, time and uncertainty cost money.

We discussed examples of projects that meet technical and regulatory requirements only to encounter a new political obstacle late in development. A pipeline can face a new barrier to a river crossing. A generation project can spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars developing a site only to have a local government adopt requirements late in the process that make the project economically impossible.

The government has an important role in protecting the public interest. But good regulation should establish the rules of the road, not continually move the road. 

Developers need to know the rules. Communities deserve to know what is being proposed. Landowners deserve to understand how a project may affect their property. And elected officials need accurate information early enough in the process to make informed decisions.

One thing all three of us agreed on was the importance of early engagement. Community engagement cannot begin at the public hearing.

By then, positions may already be hardened and misinformation may already have filled the information vacuum.

Developers need to engage elected officials, neighboring landowners and community leaders early. They need to explain what the project is, what it isn't, what benefits it may bring, what impacts it may create and how those impacts will be addressed.

Of greatest importance - they absolutely must tell the truth.

Trust is difficult to build and extremely easy to lose. Early engagement, education and transparency do not guarantee that every project gets approved. Nor should they. But they dramatically improve the chances that the debate will be based on facts rather than fear.

The Power Wall Is Real

Another notable session was The Power Wall: AI, Industry, and the New Era of Energy Demand.

The title says a lot about the challenge facing Louisiana. AI and data centers are changing the scale and speed of electricity demand. But that does not mean Louisiana should turn away from those investments. It means we need to recognize what comes with them.

A multibillion-dollar industrial announcement is only the beginning. Someone has to generate the electricity. Someone has to transmit it. Someone has to build the substations. Someone has to secure the land. Someone has to obtain the permits.

And somebody ultimately has to pay for all of it.

That is why generation development can no longer be treated as separate from economic development - they are the same conversation.

Louisiana's Energy History Gives Us an Advantage, How Do We Leverage That Moving Forward?

One of my biggest takeaways from the Forum is that Louisiana does not need to abandon its traditional energy economy to participate in the next one. Our experience in oil and gas, LNG, petrochemicals, pipelines, offshore services, and utility infrastructure gives Louisiana an enormous advantage as new energy technologies develop - an advantage perfectly illustrated by the geothermal discussion led by Cindy Taff, CEO of Sage Geosystems. 

With more than 35 years in oil and gas, including leadership roles at Shell, she’s now applying that same hard-earned expertise to develop enhanced geothermal systems designed to deliver firm, reliable power. That is not the old energy economy being replaced by the new - it’s energy know-how evolving. 

The same is true across nuclear power, where experts in project finance, nuclear policy, and advanced reactor development came together to address what it will take to build for the future; the same is true for batteries and offshore wind; and it is certainly true for solar. 

The bottom line is that Louisiana knows energy. Our challenge is ensuring we remain an energy leader as technologies mature and as customers’ needs change. For years now, energy debates have too often been framed as fossil fuels versus renewables, but I believe that argument is becoming increasingly outdated. 

The market is asking a different question: Where is the power going to come from? 

Customers want reliability. Families and businesses want affordability. Industrial users want certainty. 

Many large customers also want renewable energy as part of their supply, economic development leaders want enough electricity to recruit the next project, utilities need resources they can actually build, developers need predictable rules, and communities deserve a meaningful voice in what gets built around them. 

Those goals do not require us to choose between natural gas and solar, nuclear and wind, or pipelines and batteries. They require us to figure out how all of these resources can work together. 

That’s why I left the Tulane Future of Energy Forum more convinced than ever that Louisiana needs an all-of-the-above energy strategy driven by economics, reliability, and market demand rather than political ideology. 

Yes, there will be disagreements about individual projects, especially on siting, transmission, cost allocation, property rights, and community impacts. Thoughtful regulation matters, but we shouldn’t confuse accountability with stopping development. 

Louisiana has an extraordinary economic opportunity in front of us, and capturing it will require something very basic: power. Reliable, affordable, dispatchable, and renewable power, supported by new transmission to move it to where it’s needed most, and an environment where companies can invest the billions required to build what comes next. If Louisiana wants to keep winning the economic development race, we have to be willing to build the energy infrastructure that powers it.