Agencies

ERCOT

ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) operates the electric grid that serves approximately 90% of Texas and manages the wholesale electricity market for that region.

Referenced in 160 briefingsLast referenced: August 15, 2026

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August 15, 2026

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County Judge Philip Spenrath's NDA Hardens Opposition on Amazon's 3,000 Acres

August 14, 2026

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Carrying Costs Compound After Aug. 20 as ERCOT Audits for Months

August 12, 2026

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SpaceX's $16.8B Terafab Puts Gas and Batteries on the Critical Path

August 11, 2026

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Gov. Abbott's Audit Leaves Batch Zero With No Restart Date

August 10, 2026

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Trump Split With Gov. Abbott Just Compressed Every Operator's Audit Timeline

August 8, 2026

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Skybox, Digital Realty, Mara, Montera Sign Binding Pledges to Gov. Abbott

August 7, 2026

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Gov. Abbott Guardrails Win First QTS Commitment on Grid Upgrades

August 6, 2026

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Self-Supplied Sites Move Ahead While Grid Projects Wait

August 5, 2026

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One Keller Comment Filing Shows How the Statewide Audit Reaches Each Project

August 4, 2026

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Every Queued Project Must Now Prove Water and Generation, With No End Date Set

August 3, 2026

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Meta's El Paso Campus Hits 1 GW Without Buying a Single Server

August 1, 2026

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The Same $50K Fee That Screens Datacenters Now Applies to Chevron and Samsung

July 31, 2026

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Google's Guarantee on Anthropic's Lease Is What Unlocked $14B in Bridge Debt

July 30, 2026

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Ride-Through Rules Bind New Texas Loads August 1; Old Specs Won't Retrofit Cheap

July 29, 2026

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AMD's 15-Year Lease Only Pays Off If West Texas Transmission Lands on Time

July 28, 2026

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Post Security Before the Study, or Watch Your 2027 Slot Go to a Buildable Project

July 27, 2026

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Sen. Bettencourt Signals Tighter Rules as the $3.3B Break Hits Finance July 27

July 26, 2026

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Sen. Huffman's January Bill Targets the Exemption That Built Fermi and Stargate

July 25, 2026

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Abbott Sets Five Site Standards, and East Texas Is the First Test

July 24, 2026

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At 500 MW, the Campus Becomes the Grid Plan. Texas Wired $33B In.

July 23, 2026

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Georgia Lands OpenAI's $30B Bet While Texas Owns the Queue Fix

July 21, 2026

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Nueces County Campus Goes From Greenfield to Full Lease in Months

July 13, 2026

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The Permit Was Never the Hard Part. The Neighbors Are.

July 12, 2026

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North Carolina Repeals Its Power Tax Break. Texas Never Had One to Lose.

July 10, 2026

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430 Opposition Groups in a Year. The Ones Who Engage Early Still Break Ground.

July 9, 2026

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89% of New Power Requests Are Datacenters. Abbott Wants Guardrails.

July 8, 2026

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Ratepayers Come Off the Hook. Developers Underwrite the Wires Themselves.

July 7, 2026

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The Permian Gets Texas's First 765 kV Backbone, and CREZ Wrote the Playbook

July 6, 2026

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The April Deadline Beats the Rulebook by Three Years

June 26, 2026

Five Tests Now Separate Real Load From Speculation in Texas

The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved ERCOT's "Batch Zero" study in June 2026, a centralized process that separates committed gigawatt-scale loads from speculative requests through readiness tests: site control, permits, financing, equipment orders, realistic demand forecasts.

May 20, 2026

Water Plan Skips the 400 GW Queue. Smart Developers Won't.

Eric Goff of Goff Policy calls the queue "effectively infinite," and ERCOT's "Batch Zero" framework, plus the first PUCT-approved 765 kV lines and the ERCOT Board's $9.4 billion Eastern Backbone, are the mechanisms that convert queue position into construction schedule.

May 16, 2026

Beacon Point Sets the 1-GW Template While 300 GW Wait in Queue

Risk: with ERCOT's queue exceeding 300 GW and Deloitte projecting AI datacenter demand at 123 GW by 2035, developers without an executed interconnection agreement and a credible firm-generation path won't energize on the timelines their leases assume.

May 1, 2026

Fort Bliss Becomes the Borderland's Third Gigawatt Build in 18 Months

ERCOT's interconnection queue hit 432 GW against 85.5 GW peak demand, and Caprock Renewables founder Raina Hornaday describes the resulting shift as "the energization of land," with distributed generation and behind-the-meter resources outpacing transmission-dependent models.

April 25, 2026

PUCT Just Drew the Line on Which Grid Bypasses Count

The Public Utility Commission of Texas unanimously approved the first direct wind-farm-to-datacenter connection on the ERCOT grid, the same week ERCOT's high-side demand scenario, peak load above 367,000 MW by 2032, was sent back as unrealistic.

April 19, 2026

Anchored Offtake Wins the Queue. Speculation Gets Repriced.

ERCOT's preliminary Long-Term Load Forecast projects Texas peak demand reaching 367.8 GW by 2032, more than four times the August 2023 record of 85.5 GW, with non-crypto data center load climbing from 7.4 GW in 2026 to 228.4 GW.

April 10, 2026

Caprock Broke Ground. Projects That Can't Match It Won't.

Aligned Data Centers broke ground on Project Caprock, a 540MW, $5 billion campus near Abernathy in Hale County, while at the Capitol, lawmakers grilled ERCOT and PUC officials on who pays for the state's data center surge, and Google confirmed a 933MW natural gas plant under construction in Armstrong County.

April 9, 2026

Nine Months to Shape the Rules Texas Is About to Write

ERCOT's interconnection queue has ballooned to 410 gigawatts of requested capacity by 2030, nearly five times the grid's all-time peak of 85.5 GW, forcing the grid operator and the Public Utility Commission to improvise new rules in real time.

April 7, 2026

Medina County Told Microsoft No. Here's the Playbook It Used.

Gov. Abbott's press secretary stated facilities "are required to bring their own power and to disconnect if Texans don't have what they need," and regulators require large data centers to register with ERCOT and the PUC, provide backup power, and help fund grid upgrades.

March 23, 2026

NextEra Bets $16 Billion That Texas Demand Is Real

NextEra Energy secured federal approval to build 10GW of natural gas generation across Texas and Pennsylvania, anchored by a 5.2GW, $16 billion Project Anderson in Anderson County that will feed directly into ERCOT.

March 15, 2026

Solve Water Before You Break Ground, or Else

Early reports suggest these projects still face ERCOT's severe interconnection backlog; any queue delays push Google toward supplemental gas procurement, undermining the renewable supply strategy.

March 11, 2026

Texas Developers Need No Permission. Rural Counties Are Changing That.

The resolution, sent to Governor Abbott, Lt. Gov. Patrick, the PUCT, ERCOT, and the Texas Water Development Board, follows a public hearing that drew roughly 90 residents and reflects a pattern now visible across Hood County, Somervell County, and Jack County simultaneously.

March 3, 2026

Gigawatt Ambitions, County-Level Resistance: Who Blinks First?

The GW Ranch project in West Texas takes this to its logical extreme: an 8,000-acre facility generating its own electricity from on-site gas and solar, consuming more power than all of Chicago while avoiding ERCOT interconnection queues altogether.

February 20, 2026

Big Tech's Grid Bypass Meets a 14-State Backlash

In Texas, this trend compounds ERCOT's planning challenge: if the largest loads bypass the grid entirely, transmission investment assumptions and reliability models built around centralized dispatch become unreliable.

February 13, 2026

Capital Keeps Pouring In. Communities Are Closing the Gate.

Texas isn't named in this legislative wave, but the trend is directly relevant: ERCOT's deregulated market creates different cost-shifting dynamics, and Texas's competitive posture could attract developers fleeing states with new rate guardrails, concentrating even more load on the Texas grid.

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