Dub Kittrell
Dub sits on the Barrio Grid map. Ask him about any piece of Texas the way you would ask it out loud: who serves it, how far to a real wire, what is queued nearby, what power trades for. He pulls the data and moves the map to the answer.
Free account with an email code. No card.
Who he is
Forty-some years running title, leases and right-of-way from the Permian Basin down to the Coastal Bend. Dub started as a courthouse runner in Midland, spent a career walking fence lines and reading deed records, and figured out late that the next land rush follows the transmission lines.
These days he reads the grid the way he used to read the courthouse: substations and lines, the ERCOT queue, nodal prices, city limits, pipelines and flood zones. He is an AI character made by Barrio Energy. The backstory is his; the answers come from the data.
Why he exists
Barrio Grid is also an MCP connector: one URL that gives Claude, ChatGPT or any MCP-capable assistant direct access to the Texas grid data behind the map. That is the most capable way to use it, and most people have not connected an assistant to anything yet. Dub is the same connector, already wired in. No setup, no API key; open the map and ask.
How he works
- You askPlain English. A county, an address, a substation, a node, or just what you are building and roughly where.
- He picks the toolsThe same tools the connector gives any AI assistant. Several rounds of calls per question when the answer needs them.
- The map movesEvery place he names gets a pin, the layers that fit the question turn on, and "Show on map" chips jump back to each spot.
- You follow upHe keeps the thread. "What about the next county over" works. The conversation stays in your browser until you reset it.
Open with something broad and he asks one question first: what you are building, how many megawatts, and roughly where or when. Then he works from that and does not ask again.
100 MW battery near Odessa
"I'm looking at a 100 MW, 4-hour battery in the Permian. Which nodes around Odessa have the best TB4 spreads, and how crowded is the storage queue there?"
Dub ranked nodes within 50 miles by day-ahead TB4 spread and pulled the battery queue within 15 miles. What came back:
- The top nodes, led by one in Andrews County at about $52/MWh on a 30-day TB4 average, roughly $76,000 per MW a year annualized
- 7 active storage projects totaling about 1.4 GW within 15 miles of Odessa
- The furthest-along competitor: a 256 MW project with a signed interconnection agreement and a 2027 COD
- Where new interest is clustering: a 345 kV corridor and the substations on it
Pro plan, 25 Sep 2026. Prices are trailing day-ahead averages and change daily; ask again for today's numbers.
What he knows
Everything on the map and in the connector: 4,939 substations and the transmission lines between them, the ERCOT generation and battery storage queues, day-ahead and real-time prices at all 1,123 ERCOT settlement points, ancillary service prices, planned transmission, city limits and estimated ETJ, counties, school and groundwater districts, gas pipelines, fiber routes and carrier hotels, FEMA flood zones, Qualified Opportunity Zones, air permits and industrial neighbors, data center projects, how counties and cities have acted on data centers, and The Grid Report.
Sources include HIFLD, ERCOT, TNRIS StratMap, county appraisal rolls, TCEQ, the Railroad Commission, FEMA, TxDOT, the Census Bureau, TWDB, the FCC and provider GIS. Details and refresh schedules are in the docs.
His playbooks
Battery storage
The node is the asset. He reads TB4 spread rather than average price, checks real-time spreads against day-ahead, and counts what is already queued at nearby points of interconnection, since a stack of batteries at the same substation is competition for the same wire. Ancillary service prices have fallen hard since 2024, so he makes the case on arbitrage.
Solar
Big, flat, contiguous ground out of the floodway, sized in acres per MW-ac. He looks at midday prices, not the daily average: solar capture ratio, negative-price hours and curtailment exposure at the node, then the same interconnection questions as any generator.
Grid questions, any use
Who serves a spot, the nearest substation at a given voltage, lines within a few miles, jurisdiction, flood, pipelines, fiber, planned upgrades and what has changed nearby lately. This works for data centers, generation and industrial load on every plan.
The Land Desk
Tract-level powered land work: parcels near the right wire, who owns them, and a full site screen with the flags behind the score. Enterprise only, approved account by account. ivan@barrioenergy.com
Want a playbook he does not have yet? Tell him what you are looking for, or use Request a feature. New playbooks come from what people ask.
By plan
| Plan | Questions a day | What his answers include |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 20 | Grid facts, locations and prices. Queue projects with location and stage, without names or capacity. |
| Pro | 200 | Dub+: the same Dub on a stronger model. Adds project names and sizes, longer price history and real-time metrics. |
| Enterprise | 500 | The Land Desk: landowners, parcel searches and site scores. |
Limits reset at midnight Central. Pricing. Works on the phone too.
What he will not do
- Invent a dollar cost, a build schedule, an interconnection timeline or a utility rate. Barrio Grid carries none of that, so he says so and gives the physical facts that drive it.
- Treat a queue position as capacity. The serving utility has the final word on what a substation can take.
- Pass off an estimate as a boundary. Estimated ETJ is marked as an estimate.
- Give legal, title or investment advice. His answers are screening data; check anything that matters.
What happens to what you tell him
What you tell Dub about your project (what you are building, size, timing, region) is kept on your account so he does not ask twice, and Barrio Energy may use it to follow up with you about powered sites. Ask and we delete it. See the privacy policy.
Open the map and ask him something
Free account, email code, no card. Or plug the same data into your own assistant.