The Electric Reliability Council of Texas plans to audit hundreds of data center proposals by December 10, a required step to restart grid connections for large facilities across the state, grid officials announced Thursday. The audit comes after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on new data center connections earlier this month, demanding answers about their consumption of energy, water, and taxpayer dollars. The delay may push back other planning work by the grid operator, including its long-term electricity demand forecast and reliability review, officials told the Public Utility Commission of Texas.
About 300 data centers of 75 megawatts or larger are moving through the so-called Batch Zero process, and ERCOT will also conduct a community impact review on data centers and cryptocurrency facilities as small as 25 MW to meet Abbott's requirements, according to officials. ERCOT's interconnection queue requests total roughly 474 gigawatts, with approximately 90% coming from data centers, Abbott's letter to the grid operator showed. However, a significant share of that figure may be speculative or duplicative, experts say, since the queue exceeds ERCOT's record peak electricity demand by more than five times. ERCOT also has 17 large facilities, mostly data centers, that have already completed a stability assessment and are scheduled to come online later this year, representing total peak demand of about 6.6 GW that would ramp up over roughly five years.
Chad Seely, ERCOT's senior vice president of regulatory policy and general counsel, told the commission the grid operator is developing a request for information template that will go to all large facilities provisionally qualified in Batch Zero. "We expect to start sending those out as early as the end of the month and into the first part of September," Seely said, adding that additional rounds may follow in October and November. According to Seely, ERCOT aims to deliver a comprehensive report on the verification and audit process to the commission a week before its December open meeting. ERCOT also sent requests this week to utilities for an update on medium-sized facilities, Seely noted, pointing to an April snapshot showing about 157 medium data center and crypto facilities representing almost 8,800 MW expected to connect to the grid at some point.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved good cause exceptions for ERCOT to an August 7, 2026, Batch Zero classification deadline that Abbott's moratorium interrupted, the grid operator reported. ERCOT hasn't yet asked regulators to adjust a deadline to deliver the Batch Zero interconnection study results because the grid operator doesn't yet know how the delay will affect the study timeline, according to a presentation filed with the commission. "We will not have the study done by April 9, 2027," Seely said, explaining that officials are still determining what the new timeline might be. The Texas legislative session "could delay things further," Jefferies equity analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith said in a research note Thursday.
Those 17 large facilities that have cleared all ERCOT gates except the final approval to energize will still need to complete some form of the verification and audit process, and they'll receive the community impact request for information as officials move forward over the next several weeks, Seely said. The December 10 filing deadline represents a critical juncture for Texas's new approach to handling large electricity consumers, with hundreds of projects in limbo until the audit process wraps up and the state answers fundamental questions about data centers' resource demands.