Grid operator
The grid operator for most of Texas, and the single biggest chokepoint in US AI buildout right now.
474 GW in its paused large-load queue
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Core Scientific and Ionic Digital both got conditional Batch Zero sign-offs from the state grid operator, the clearest sign yet that its frozen queue of large power requests is moving again.
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ERCOT paused its first batch of big power requests in August; this week the companies in it began reporting which of their gigawatts got a conditional place.
· L1 Power and land · TCEQ permits halted; all state approvals paused; update due 19 Oct · Confirmed
Texas Governor Greg Abbott on 21 September directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to halt all permits sought by data centres until ERCOT, the state's grid operator, finishes its audit of the data centres waiting to connect to the grid. He said no state agency shall move forward with approvals for data-centre development until that information is in hand. Data centres, he said, must cover all their electrical infrastructure costs, must not use water that local communities need, and must report their electricity and water use. The regulator has to report back on how it is complying by 19 October, and Abbott said he will work with the legislature next session to end financial incentives for data centres. It follows his 14 September order telling the state water board to enforce data centres' water-use reporting.
· L1 Power and land · $50,000 per MW security; loads of 75 MW or more · Confirmed
The Public Utility Commission of Texas adopted its large-load interconnection rule, 16 TAC §25.194, in an order filed on 18 September. It carries out Senate Bill 6, passed by the Texas legislature. Before a large power user such as a data centre can be included in an ERCOT study of how to connect it, it must now sign an intermediate agreement, make certain disclosures and post financial security of $50,000 per megawatt. The rule sets what happens to that security if a customer withdraws or gives false information, and the terms for returning it once the site is switched on. Loads below 75 megawatts are outside the rule. For a 1-gigawatt campus, that is $50 million up front, by our arithmetic.
· L1 Power and land · 200-207 MW; 20 years; $116m letter of credit · Confirmed
New Era Energy & Digital says its subsidiary TCDC PowerCo signed a power purchase agreement on 18 September with Luminant for a minimum of 200 and up to 207 megawatts, from a 1,180-megawatt gas-fired plant in Odessa, Texas, owned by Luminant's affiliate Vistra, or from other sources or the ERCOT grid. The power is for the company's Texas Critical Data Center project on land near the plant. The contract runs 20 years from first delivery, New Era must post a 116 million dollar letter of credit, and Vistra is to receive a 5 percent non-voting stake in the project company once power flows. For people in Odessa nothing changes yet: Luminant's obligations depend on conditions being met by the end of 2027.
· L1 Power and land · 1,031 MW across Pecos and Hunt, conditional · Confirmed
Core Scientific said on 10 September that ERCOT, Texas's grid operator, has conditionally classified three blocks of its load in Batch Zero, the process ERCOT uses to sort large new users. At Pecos, the existing 300 megawatts was approved as Base Load and a further 300 megawatts as Studied Load, a weaker category still subject to allocation. At Hunt, the planned 431 megawatts was approved as Base Load. That is 1,031 megawatts in all. The company's 297 megawatts at Denton, energised before March 2022, and a further 74 megawatts there are not part of Batch Zero. Every classification is conditional, and the final allocation and ramp come only when Batch Zero ends, so none of this says when new power arrives.
Read the story: ERCOT puts a label on about 1.5 gigawatts of Texas data centre load in a single week · ERCOT
· L1 Power and land · 166 MW conditionally Base Load · Confirmed
Soluna Holdings, a company that builds computing sites for Bitcoin mining and AI, said Texas grid operator ERCOT has conditionally classified its full 166 megawatt Kati campus, including a planned AI expansion, as Base Load in the state's Batch Zero process for sorting a backlog of large power requests. Soluna also finished the last 14 megawatts of the first phase of that campus, taking its total operating capacity across all sites to about 206 megawatts. Getting sorted into a workable category in ERCOT's queue is a necessary step before a project can actually get built and connected to the grid. For Texans, this is one more data point in a large and ongoing backlog of computing projects waiting on the state's grid, and a Base Load classification is a procedural step, not a guarantee of when power will actually flow.
· L1 Power and land · approx 4.2 GW · Confirmed
After the Texas governor's directive of 3 August, the state utility commission on 20 August let the grid operator ERCOT hand out conditional classifications to large power connection requests while it audits the data centre projects in its queue, Galaxy says. The results are now arriving through the companies themselves. Galaxy says five of its Texas data centre projects, covering approximately 4.2 gigawatts of gross power capacity, received conditional classifications: 800 megawatts and 830 megawatts at its Helios campus as "Base Load", capacity Galaxy says ERCOT had approved in January 2026, and 700, 900 and 1,000 megawatts as "Studied Load", including one project it had submitted as Base Load. Galaxy's release says Base Load projects are not subject to further capacity allocation in ERCOT's study, while Studied Load projects are. Galaxy says ERCOT expects its audit to take several months, so nothing is final. For people in Texas, this is the process that decides how much new data centre demand gets a place on their grid, and the labels handed out this week are its first visible output.
Read the story: The Texas queue is moving again, one company filing at a time · ERCOT
· Band Rules and society · $45M · Reported
Campaigns have spent more than $45 million on political adverts that mention data centres. Two years ago the subject barely appeared in an election. It is now something candidates campaign on.
· L1 Power and land · Batch Zero paused · Confirmed
Texas had begun sorting its queue of very large electricity users into study batches. The governor ordered a verification step first, so ERCOT stopped telling utilities how the first batch had been classified. Nothing was cancelled. The clock simply stopped.
· L1 Power and land · 474 GW · Confirmed
Texas has requests to connect 474 gigawatts of very large electricity users, and nine in ten of them are data centres. For scale, the whole Texas grid has never had to serve more than about 86 gigawatts at once. Almost none of this will be built, but the queue is what the grid has to plan around.
· L1 Power and land · 6 RTOs · Confirmed
America's energy regulator gave all six regional grid operators 60 days to either defend their existing rules for very large electricity customers or change them. Data centres are the reason. Those rules were written when nothing on the network drew this much power.
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