Oct. 12 Data Gates Who Gets Studied in ERCOT's Dec. 10 Audit

Governor Greg Abbott has broadened Texas’s data center freeze so the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality holds new data center permits while separate agency work runs in parallel: ERCOT’s large-load information request still has responses due October 12 and an audit due December 10, the Texas Water Development Board is enforcing water-use surveys with penalty and criminal-referral exposure, and TCEQ must file a halt-compliance report by October 19.

In the same week, Wimberley resident Peter Chambers filed PUCT Control No. 58317, Item 76, documenting Pedernales Electric Cooperative’s base power charge move to $0.0659/kWh and monthly power costs averaging 24 percent higher year over year as Hays County large-load proposals advance.

The developer exposure is sequencing: queue position and capital only hold if demand documentation, self-supply plans, and water filings are audit-ready before those dates, while household rate pressure is already on named legislators’ desks.

Out-of-state capitals are writing cost, water, and transparency rules without freezing every project. Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger rolled out a Data Center Accountability Framework and signed Executive Order 22, banning NDAs between data centers and state agencies, targeting by-right approvals above 25 MW, stripping fast-track permitting, locking DEQ water-scarcity mapping east of I-95, and leaning on Dominion’s GS5 large-load rate class with 14-year contracts.

Maryland Governor Wes Moore created a Data Center Accountability Task Force that sorts projects “Aligned” or not against five principles: ratepayer and grid protection, economic benefits, community voice, environmental protections, and transparency; 13 Maryland jurisdictions already have temporary moratoriums, Baltimore County extended its pause through end of 2027, and Harford County approved an outright ban. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a seven-bill package that includes separate data center power rates (SB 886, AB 2383), tighter environmental review (SB 887), and written water-use disclosure before local approval (AB 2469).

On federal land and in the Mountain West, Rhea Data’s 4 million-sq-ft Boise-area BLM right-of-way application drew opposition from Boise Mayor Lauren McLean and the Idaho Sierra Club, and the Wyoming Outdoor Council’s Casper forum put water, wastewater transparency, and co-located generation cooling at the center of Prometheus Hyperscale’s proposed 1.5 GW Natrona County campus. Capital still prices Texas for speed and scale; operators who treat these statutes as cautionary site-selection inputs, not templates to import, keep the Texas path open.

Chambers’s PUCT letter is addressed to state Reps. Carrie Isaac and Erin Zwiener and state Sens. Donna Campbell and Judith Zaffirini, whose districts overlap Hays County, and it ties Pedernales’ March and October 2026 rate steps to large-load growth on a queue Chambers cites at 466.5 GW.

Local load is concrete: the CloudBurst campus proposes 1,200 MW across Hays and Guadalupe counties with county tax abatement already approved, three other major facilities are tracked locally, Hays County Commissioners Court has adopted an industrial high-water-use resolution, and Pedernales has flagged new 138 kV work at the Wimberley Substation a half-mile from downtown.

Abbott and Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa both support ending state sales tax incentives for data centers, and ERCOT’s power-and-water-use audits won’t conclude until at least December, with multi-agency work set to inform 2027 legislative rulemaking.

Bottom line: operators in the Austin, San Antonio corridor should treat benefit-sharing, ratepayer isolation, and filed water offsets as county-table stakes now, not post-election cleanup.

ERCOT is working through roughly 474 GW of data center connection requests against a summer peak near 90 GW; ERCOT President and CEO Pablo Vegas has called the forecast higher than expected future load growth, and PUCT Chairman Thomas Gleeson has said a lot of that load is speculative and won’t actually land.

Across the U.S., utilities are answering with large-load tariffs: minimum contract terms, collateral, upfront study payments, exit fees, and ramp schedules, while Relae tallies more than $170 billion in AI data center capacity blocked, withdrawn, or stalled by community opposition since January 2024.

Real offtake still moves: Meta signed a 144 MW solar PPA with Apex Clean Energy for Starling Solar in Gonzales County (grid-delivered; Meta takes the attributes; 2027 COD targeted; Meta, Apex now 1.2 GW combined, 344 MW in Texas), Texas-based Corscale advanced a $2.9B, 312 MW Midwest Digital Gateway in Canton, Ohio, and LG Energy Solution plus LG Electronics cleared Nvidia DSX Ready paths on JF2 storage and a 2.5 MW CDU as interconnection headroom and thermal density tighten.

Bottom line: when the Texas queue and TCEQ path reopen, signed anchors, posted collateral, and secured generation beat paper megawatts; miss the October 12 data cut and you risk sitting out the December 10 audit that shapes who gets studied first.

Abbott’s September directives put TWDB on water-use survey compliance for major users, including data centers, with penalties and criminal referrals on the table, and ERCOT is collecting cooling technology and water consumption data in the same large-load package due October 12.

Hays County’s high-water-use resolution and the Chambers filing already pair water with rate politics at the county line; Corscale’s Canton filing pegs evaporative peak use at 400,000 gallons on the hottest day, about 4 percent of local available capacity, while funding its own water and sewer extensions.

Wyoming’s forum underscored two blind spots operators should price in Texas basins now: wastewater discharge without mandatory public reporting, and co-located generation cooling that can dwarf IT-load gallons if the full stack isn’t modeled up front.

Bottom line: file the surveys, document closed-loop or offset math, and integrate generation-cooling water into the same package regulators will read this fall, or carry enforcement and redesign risk into 2027.