States Race to Write the Rules Before the Next Megawatt Comes Online

ERCOT's "batch zero" interconnection study won't launch until late summer at the earliest, stranding 232 GW of large load requests on a grid that has never cracked 85.5 GW of peak demand. While Texas works through that bottleneck, a wave of state legislatures from Pennsylvania to Illinois to South Carolina is racing to answer the cost allocation question: who pays when datacenters show up? The answers are diverging fast, creating a fragmentation problem that makes multi-state portfolio planning increasingly treacherous. Meanwhile, water is quietly emerging as the binding constraint nobody budgeted for, community opposition in Central Texas is escalating from testimony to shouting matches, and a 7GW campus announcement in New Mexico is testing the line between ambition and vaporware.