Dive Brief:
- The Electric Reliability Council of Texas intends to audit hundreds of data center proposals by Dec. 10, grid officials said Thursday, a necessary step for its Batch Zero study process to continue and for grid interconnections of the large loads to resume.
- On Aug. 3, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, R, called for a moratorium on new data center interconnections until questions around their use of energy, water and public funds could be answered.
- The delay to the first set of projects to navigate the state’s new large load interconnection process may push back other ERCOT planning efforts, including the grid operator’s long-term load forecast and reliability assessment, officials said at the Public Utility Commission of Texas open meeting.
Dive Insight:
There are about 300 data centers 75 MW or larger navigating the Batch Zero process, and ERCOT will also perform a community impact review on data centers and crypto facilities of 25 MW and above, to comply with Abbott’s directive, officials said.
ERCOT interconnection queue requests total about 474 GW, and approximately 90% are data centers, according to Abbott’s letter to the grid operator. However, a substantial portion of that may be speculative or duplicative, experts say, as the queue is more than five times ERCOT’s record peak electricity demand.
ERCOT is in the process of developing a request for information template that will go to all the large loads that are provisionally qualified in Batch Zero, Chad Seely, the grid operator’s senior vice president of regulatory policy, and its general counsel and chief compliance officer, said at the open meeting.
“We expect to start sending those out as early as the end of the month and into the first part of September, and then as we move forward into October and November, there may be additional rounds of RFIs,” Seely said.
“Our goal is to head toward a December 10 filing,” Seely said, including a comprehensive report on the verification and audit process delivered to the PUCT a week before its open meeting that month.
The PUCT approved good cause exceptions for ERCOT to an Aug. 7, 2026, Batch Zero classification deadline that Abbott’s moratorium interrupted. The grid operator has not yet requested regulators adjust a deadline to deliver the Batch Zero interconnection study results “because ERCOT does not yet know how the delay will impact the study timeline,” according to a presentation the grid operator filed with the commission.
“We will not have the study done by April 9, 2027. I think what we're saying is, we're still working on what that new timeline might be,” Seely said.
The Texas legislative session “could delay things further,” Jefferies equity analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith said in a research note today.
Seely also said that ERCOT, this week, sent out RFIs to utilities for an update on medium-sized loads.
“We have an April snapshot that has about 157 medium data center and crypto facilities, representing almost 8,800 MW, that is expected to come on the grid at some point,” he said. “We've asked those utilities to update that information so we have a real time baseline as we start to move forward with the community impact RFI.”
Seely also noted that ERCOT has 17 large loads, mostly data centers, that have already gone through a stability assessment and are scheduled to come online later this year. The projects would have total peak demand of about 6.6 GW, ramping up over about five years.
“Of course, we have not approved those energization requests ... these loads would still have to go through some form of the verification and audit process, and they will get the community impact [RFI] as well, as we move forward here over the next several weeks,” Seely said. “But they are the furthest along in the process where they've made it through all the ERCOT gates, except for that last gate, which is the approval to energize.”
