EthosEnergy Talks Heat Rate, Flexibility, and Energy Transition at POWERGEN 2026

The explosive emergence of data centers and snowballing power demand has significantly transformed the power generation industry in recent years: longer lead times for gas turbines, tackling grid constraints, and a restructured conversation around decarbonization/energy transition. POWERGEN 2026 exemplified this market shift as many companies, including EthosEnergy, provided insight on how to navigate this new landscape.

Daniel Tegtmeier, Director of the Performance Center at EthosEnergy, further clarified this transformative industry movement at the conference. Operators are increasingly focused on extending assets already connected to the grid; thus, heat rate and flexibility become primary markers of efficient power generation.

TURBO: Why are flexibility and heat rate such important drivers for thermal plants and the overall energy transition?

Tegtmeier: Firstly, let’s start with the energy transition as its definition is changing with the rise of data centers. The energy transition used to be decarbonization, renewables, and how they connect and compete with conventional generation on a grid. While these technologies are still important, you must make the most of available assets. With heat rate, this ensures the efficiency of the units, controls fuel, etc. These topics are why heat rate and flexibility are so important.

TURBO: What are some challenges associated with improving heat rate and flexibility?

Tegtmeier: There’s only so much capital to go around for a given power plant—you have budgets, and you must stay within those budgets and allocations. The first step is to focus on controllable losses. Controllable losses are hugely important when you’re trying to get the machine’s full output or gain control of similar aspects. Once you have a good controllable losses program in place, now you can rank improvement projects and capitalization projects to either gain efficiency back or increase the output of the machine through efficiency gains.