Thursday, June 18, 2026

225 Interconnection Requests, One Filter: ERCOT Sorts Real From Paper

PUCT reviews ERCOT's Batch Zero framework Thursday, the filter that sorts financed interconnection requests from speculative filings. The same discipline now separates winners: locked generation, funded water lines, anchored contracts move ahead while projects siting on grid capacity carry the uncertainty.

Today's Lead

ERCOT is close to rewiring how it screens the flood of power demand chasing the Texas grid. The board voted June 2 to launch "Batch Zero," a tiered process that isolates financed, land-secured projects from speculative paper, and the Public Utility Commission of Texas reviews the framework Thursday. The stakes are concrete: ERCOT took in 225 large-load interconnection requests in 2025 alone, five times what its current system was built for, and about 70% are data centers.

The math forces the change. ERCOT's April 2025 forecast pegs 2032 peak demand at 367,790 MW, more than four times the 85,508 MW record set in August 2023, with over 250,000 MW from large load. Developers with secured anchors and clear capital paths move into Batch Zero first. The laggards wait, or exit the queue they could have controlled.

[1]

Power

Behind-the-meter generation goes from hedge to table stakes.

The grid queue is full, so developers are building their own power. Circe Energy's West Texas campus locked long-term gas generation from Cummins, ordering HSK78 and QSK60 sets for 2026 through 2030 deliveries, with energization starting in 2027. OpenAI's Stargate site in Abilene tells the harder half of the story: Crusoe won a 360 MW gas permit in six days, then ordered 29 GE Vernova aeroderivative turbines toward 1 GW, choosing jet-engine units because combined-cycle turbines now carry seven-year lead times. Self-supply gets you off the interconnection queue, but supply-chain risk replaces it.

That's the discipline gap. Smart developers front-load equipment sourcing and lock manufacturing slots years out; Alberta's experience shows what waiting costs, with GE Vernova sold out through 2028 and capital costs for combined-cycle plants doubled in two years. Permit fast, source early, build what's available now.

[2]·[3]·[4]

Politics

Abbott's ratepayer directive meets a legal wall.

Governor Abbott's June 10 letter asked PUCT chairman Thomas Gleeson and ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas to propose rules shielding residential customers from data center-driven bills. The catch, per Foley & Lardner's Scott Ellis: Texas law currently bars the PUC and ERCOT from intervening in cost allocation, and only the Legislature can rewrite that. Opposition is real and bipartisan: a February 23 protest at the Capitol led by Somervell County Commissioner Chip Joslin demanded local regulatory authority, and the Republican Party of Texas added anti-data center language to its platform.

Contrast Colorado, where the legislature failed to act in 2026 and Denver, Jefferson County, and Longmont filled the void with moratoriums and a 100 MW cap. Texas keeps the action at the state level. Developers who've anchored contracts and secured generation weather the tightening; those still site-selecting on grid capacity carry the uncertainty into a rulemaking that won't settle until after the election cycle.

[5]·[6]

Water

Dedicated infrastructure keeps developers out of the public utility fight.

Google is funding a $10 million cooling water line in Lincoln, Nebraska, running about three miles to its data center area, completion targeted for January 2027 at peak capacity near 2.94 million gallons per day. Lincoln Transportation and Utilities' logic is the point: a dedicated industrial line stops Google from competing with residents for treatment capacity. Amazon's $10 billion Missouri campus follows the same playbook, designed for water-based cooling under 7% of the year and committing to fund and transfer water infrastructure to the local district.

The mechanics travel to Texas. Front-load water planning and permitting, build dedicated systems, close the regulatory loop early. Cities that skip these partnerships hit capacity conflicts; the developers who fund them advance site selection while competitors stall.

[7]·[8]

Sources we cited

8 articles across 8 publishers · 289 reviewed today

[1]Texas Tribune
As data centers seek to tap Texas’ energy, grid regulators are close to approving a new way of vetting requests
Jun 17, 2026·If you look at recent forecasts for future demand on Texas’s energy grid, the state must find a way to more than quadruple its energy produc…
[2]Construction Review
Texas AI Data Center Moves to Behind-the-Meter Gas Power Model in New Circe Energy Deal
Jun 16, 2026·A Texas high-performance computing (HPC) data center project is advancing its behind-the-meter power strategy after Circe Energy secured a l…
[3]Distilled
OpenAI's Stargate Data Centers Are Taking Longer and Costing More Than Its Competitors'
Jun 17, 2026·Editor’s note: This story is based on extensive reporting and research that I did for Cleanview’s recently published behind-the-meter data c…
[4]TD Economics
Bridging Alberta’s AI Data Center Power Gap: A Case for Renewables
Jun 16, 2026·Alberta aims to position itself as the premier location for building artificial intelligence (AI) data centers in North America. However, li…
[5]Houston Chronicle
Greg Abbott is distancing himself from data centers with reelection on the line
Jun 18, 2026·Conduits for fiber to connect superclusters of data centers are under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas…
[6]The Colorado Sun
What’s the status of massive data centers in Colorado? Here’s what you need to know.
Jun 18, 2026·Amid the exponential growth of AI demand, data center buildouts in the West are like a balloon: Try to hold it back in one place, and it jus…
[7]Vozpopuli
A $10 million wastewater line will cool a data center, and Nebraska is turning industrial water into infrastructure
Jun 17, 2026·Construction has started near Lincoln’s Northeast Water Resource Recovery Facility on North 70th Street and McCormick Drive, where a new Goo…
[8]Datacenter Knowledge
Missouri Emerges as the Next Hyperscale Frontier Amid Growing Power Demands
Jun 17, 2026·Amazon and Google’s multibillion-dollar data center investments in Montgomery County are positioning Missouri as a key destination for hyper…

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