Thursday, August 20, 2026

Batch Zero Misses September; 205 GW Clear as PowerHouse Seeks Stay

Batch Zero slips to year-end with 205 GW clear inside ERCOT's 500 GW queue as PowerHouse seeks a stay, and House hearings tie load growth to who pays. Operators who aren't in Governor Greg Abbott's audit file risk denial while a federal 1¢/kWh tax and 200+ freezes price the delay.

Today's Lead

ERCOT won’t launch Batch Zero in September. ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas told Texas lawmakers the first large-load cohort now slips toward year-end, with nearly 500 GW of requests on file and only about 205 GW clearing into the initial review set.

PowerHouse CloudPeak Venture Alpha LLC (BZ-259, 450 MW) and PowerHouse CloudPeak Venture C LLC (BZ-180, 1,000 MW) posted $72.5M in financial security, filed Large Load Requests with CenterPoint on Nov. 13, 2025, and submitted steady-state studies on time, yet face exclusion because ERCOT didn't formally approve those studies by the July 10 cutoff. They're asking the Public Utility Commission of Texas under Control No. 59142 to mandate review and keep both projects in Batch Zero while Governor Greg Abbott's audit pause is still open.

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NATIONAL CONTEXT

Rep. Andrea Salinas, D-Ore., introduced H.R. 10102, the Data Center Community Reinvestment Act of 2026, a federal 1¢/kWh excise tax on data centers above 1 MW peak, referred to Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Science. It projects about $1.76B a year and tracks Virginia’s 1.1¢/kWh state tax; at continuous load a 1 GW facility faces roughly $88M annually before load-factor haircuts.

Out-of-state permitting risk is already priced in local votes. More than 200 local moratoriums are active, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s executive order pauses permits for facilities 50 MW+ for up to a year, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro now requires local approval before state permits, and Michigan plus Georgia alone stalled 17 projects as roughly 50 Michigan communities floated freezes. Data Center Watch tallied at least 75 projects worth about $130B blocked or delayed in the first quarter; Oracle’s 2.45 GW Project Jupiter in Doña Ana County, N.M., shows how post-approval mailers and donations struggle once the sponsor stays hidden through authorization.

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Politics

UPDATE: House hearings tie load growth to who pays and who consents

Texas House panels spent Aug. 19 on siting speed, transmission cost recovery, and local notice after Governor Greg Abbott ordered PUCT and ERCOT audits of data center grid connections on electricity, water, incentives, ownership, and community mitigation. San Marcos City Council Member Amanda Rodriguez told the Energy Committee a single 200-acre proposal would draw three times the power of her city of 90,000, with thin advance warning; Office of Public Utility Counsel CEO Ben Barklay said large loads should bear their own costs so households don’t.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Senator Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, have pressed the PUCT to scrap the proposed 765 kV buildout after a July hearing, and the yellow-bandana coalitions now treat transmission routes and datacenter hooks as one fight. Firm public commits to Abbott’s standards already include QTS, Digital Realty, EdgeConneX, Galaxy Digital, MARA, Montera, OpenAI, Skybox, Stream, Cipher, Hut 8, Lancium, Meta, Oracle, Equinix, New Era Energy & Digital, and Riot Platforms, with Amazon gov-attributed and Google at spox level; today’s hearing also named Power House Data Centers, CoreWeave, and Emergent among operators the Governor’s office says have lined up, while Diode’s Henderson County exit remains the clear foil.

Bottom line: operators who aren’t in the audit file with funded infrastructure, water reuse, and residential-buffer proof risk denial while compliant peers keep queue position.

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Power

NEW: Amazon’s Wharton campus and the fiber queue behind the megawatts

Amazon’s Project Eagle targets a nearly 3,000-acre, $10B campus near Boling in Wharton County with at least 10 buildings, and the company says it will fund its own grid upgrades, curtail in emergencies, and enter ERCOT’s 75 MW+ large-load evaluation without shifting brownout risk to ratepayers. CenterPoint hasn’t stated public capacity, actual peak draw is still undisclosed, and TCEQ air permitting isn’t filed, so the critical path is still interconnection design plus enforceable agreement language.

Zayo is adding about 8,000 route miles with NVIDIA for distributed AI, including Dallas-Austin and Houston-Austin paths, after long-haul dark-fiber demand doubled year over year in its 2025 Bandwidth Report. A developer can lock 500+ MW in Texas metros and still sit on stranded capacity until backbone catches NVIDIA-class scale-across links.

Bottom line: treat fiber route feasibility and funded interconnection language as same-day gate checks with power, or budget carrying cost in quarters, not weeks.

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Water

NEW: Offsets and rural quality now sit inside site control

Amazon may take about 500 acre-feet a year (163M gallons) of Lower Colorado River Authority surface water for Project Eagle, with no groundwater and a Kilimo partnership aimed at 225M gallons a year of Wharton rice-irrigation savings over a decade as the offset. If farm savings undershoot or campus load grows, LCRA and county stakeholders become renegotiation counterparties before energization math works.

In the Permian, Pecos County Fresh Water serving Imperial again breached EPA combined radium and gross alpha limits, part of 29 Texas systems serving more than 22,000 people with radionuclide violations in 2025, while residents haul bottled water from Fort Stockton. Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller told a Bastrop County crowd of 240+ (plus 250+ online) the region was “already out of water before the data centers got here,” folding drought and farmland loss into a bipartisan opposition list that now also covers noise, flood, and housing costs.

Bottom line: model radionuclide treatment, LCRA-class surface rights, and verified gallon offsets before land close, or inherit both utility noncompliance stigma and county denial risk.

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Sources we cited

14 articles across 14 publishers · 580 reviewed today

[1]NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth
Texas House hearing talks data center growth, possible regulation, power supply - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth
Aug 19, 2026·As data center development expands across Texas, the State legislature is beginning to study and regulate the rapidly expanding industry. A …
[2]PUCT Interchange Filings
PUCT Control No. 59142 Item 49: Request for Commission Action on Batch Zero Eligibility (CloudPeak BZ-259 & BZ-180)
Aug 19, 2026·Filed with the Public Utility Commission of Texas on 2026-08-19. Control Number: 59142 Item Number: 49 Item Type: LTRS Utility Type: E Filin…
[3]The Center Square
More data centers complying with Abbott’s directive as up to 1,800 projects halted
Aug 19, 2026·Server racks in a data center. Photo: Brett Sayles / Pexels (The Center Square) – After Gov. Greg Abbott issued two data center directives …
[4]Datacenter Knowledge
House Bill Would Put Federal Electricity Tax on Data Centers
Aug 19, 2026·H.R. 10102 would tax data center electricity at 1 cent per kWh, raising an estimated $1.76 billion annually for housing, conservation, and i…
[5]The Spokesman-Review
Tech deploys charm offensive to combat AI data center backlash - The Spokesman-Review
Aug 19, 2026·For the 230,000 people living in rural Doña Ana County, Oracle Corp.’s Project Jupiter data center has quickly become an inescapable part of…
[6]Governing
Data Centers Are Spreading. So Are Moratoriums.
Aug 20, 2026·Concerns about environmental impacts from data centers have dovetailed with a broader backlash to AI. Dozens of jurisdictions have adopted o…
[7]Japan Today
OpenAI to lease massive new AI data center in U.S., backed by Nvidia
Aug 19, 2026·ChatGPT-maker OpenAI will lease a massive new data center in the United States for 20 years, backed by a $105 billion financing commitment f…
[8]Community Impact
Texas House holds wide-ranging hearing on booming data center industry
Aug 20, 2026·San Marcos City Council Member Amanda Rodriquez told lawmakers that officials in her community need to have a larger role in data center dev…
[9]Texas Tribune
Residents and industry leaders at odds over transmission lines at legislative hearing
Aug 20, 2026·Flashes of yellow were all around the Texas Capitol grounds on Wednesday as legislators gathered to consider two of the most controversial i…
[10]Straight Arrow
How data centers became the internet’s favorite new villain — online and IRL
Aug 20, 2026·Hundreds of people jockeyed for a seat at the most in-demand event in Bastrop, Texas, on a Wednesday evening in July. More than 240 people f…
[11]Houston Chronicle
What to know about Amazon's nearly 3,000-acre data center planned outside of Houston
Aug 18, 2026·Amazon is planning a $10 billion data center campus a little more than an hour from downtown Houston. Many details about the plan, known as …
[12]datacenterfrontier.com
Zayo, NVIDIA Build the Long-Haul Backbone for Distributed AI
Aug 19, 2026·The data center industry’s increasingly power-first approach to site selection has created a follow-on question: Once the megawatts are foun…
[13]energytech.com
From Renewable Assets to AI Powerhouses: Soluna Charting Path to a New Industrial Era
Aug 19, 2026·Aerial image of Soluna's Projects Dorothy I and 11 in Texas. Image credit Soluna Holdings This is a “zig when others zagged” kind of story,…
[14]Texas Standard
Permian Basin community seeks fix for radium in its drinking water
Aug 18, 2026·Utilities serving thousands of Texans exceed legal limits for radium. By Martha Pskowski, Inside Climate NewsAugust 18, 2026 9:49 amEnergy …

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