Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.
Start free trial →Cleaning Up: Leadership in an Age of Climate Change · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Asked how much power moves across the US-Mexico border, the guest says cross-border transmission is limited today, then raises the idea of US data centers relocating to Mexico.
…has trade-offs, because at the same time, it probably makes it for a less dynamic market and a less dynamic build out of the necessary infrastructure, but done in a way where you'll probably have less of the issues of curtailment and transmission constraints that you're seeing in other markets.
…the future, given Mexico's geography, you ought to be sending a lot of clean, cheap power northwards. And I guess to perhaps neighboring countries too. Obviously, the geography is very different when you turn to the south. But how much is there a transmission conversation happening at the moment?
So I would say it's not top of the agenda. It's relatively limited. So it does happen. So, for example, we actually used to own a few projects both on the windside and in the gas to power side that sold power into Kaiso in California from Baja California in Mexico. So it does happen to a limited extent. And there are certain other interconnections across the border. At one point, there was actually a plant in South Texas that was selling power down into Mexico. And so these exchanges do happen. But I think it could happen to a larger scale. And it'll be interesting to see how that develops over time. People are thinking, for example, about data center build out as well, and whether some of these large facilities that are facing social opposition and power constraints in the US could set up at scale in Mexico, and so that you could have Mexico as an exporter not of energy, but of data. And if you start thinking then about the flows, it's interesting to think that, well, Mexico is importing the gas. Is it exporting the electricity or is it exporting the data? And kind of these flows in what is ultimately a very interrelated dynamic…
Yeah, maybe just to plug my own organization of EMBA, who recently put out their new deck around the integration of those commodities, right? The sort of electrode tech plus information revolution means that, yeah, the success of a country now is about electrons. And as you say, it could be flowing…
Yes, yes, absolutely. And yeah, we did build a wind farm, for example, that was selling under a long-term offtake contract with a utility in California. And so those type of cross-border projects, I think, will be part of the conversation going forward.
So I suppose just kind of as we start wrapping up, that at the moment, well, with a sort of slightly unpredictable neighbor to the north, but this domestically set up to hopefully attract a lot of inward investment. Is it happening at the pace that it needs to, or is it still underselling the…