ERCOT has set a December deadline to finalize the Texas governor comprehensive audit of data center interconnection queues and grid capacity constraints.
The pause on new data center interconnections could affect the Electric Reliability Council of Texas’ upcoming long-term load forecast and reliability assessment, officials said Thursday. Approximately 300 data centers of 75 megawatts (MW) or larger are currently navigating the Batch Zero interconnection process. To comply with Governor Greg Abbott’s directive, ERCOT will also conduct a community impact review for data centers and cryptocurrency mining facilities rated at 25 MW and above.
According to Abbott’s letter to the grid operator, ERCOT’s interconnection queue totals roughly 474 gigawatts (GW), with approximately 90 percent attributed to data centers. Industry experts, however, caution that a substantial portion of these requests may be speculative or duplicative, noting that the queue exceeds five times ERCOT’s record peak electricity demand.
At a recent open meeting, Chad Seely, ERCOT’s senior vice president of regulatory policy, general counsel, and chief compliance officer, announced that the grid operator is developing a request for information (RFI) template for all large loads provisionally qualified in Batch Zero. “We expect to start sending those out as early as the end of the month and into the first part of September, and then as we move forward into October and November, there may be additional rounds of RFIs,” Seely said. He added that “our goal is to head toward a December 10 filing,” which will include a comprehensive report on the verification and audit process submitted to the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) one week prior to its monthly open meeting.
The PUCT previously granted ERCOT good cause exceptions to an August 7, 2026, Batch Zero classification deadline that was disrupted by Abbott’s moratorium. Meanwhile, the grid operator has not yet asked regulators to adjust the deadline for delivering Batch Zero interconnection study results “because ERCOT does not yet know how the delay will impact the study timeline,” according to a presentation filed with the commission. “We will not have the study done by April 9, 2027. I think what we're saying is, we're still working on what that new timeline might be,” Seely stated. Jefferies equity analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith noted in a research note published today that the ongoing Texas legislative session “could delay things further.”
Separately, Seely confirmed that ERCOT issued RFIs this week to utilities requesting updates on medium-sized loads. “We have an April snapshot that has about 157 medium data center and crypto facilities, representing almost 8,800 MW, that is expected to come on the grid at some point,” he said. “We've asked those utilities to update that information so we have a real time baseline as we start to move forward with the community impact RFI.”
Seely also highlighted that ERCOT has 17 large loads, predominantly data centers, that have already cleared stability assessments and are slated to energize later this year. These projects carry a combined peak demand of approximately 6.6 GW and will ramp up over roughly five years. “Of course, we have not approved those energization requests ... these loads would still have to go through some form of the verification and audit process, and they will get the community impact [RFI] as well, as we move forward here over the next several weeks,” Seely explained. “But they are the furthest along in the process where they've made it through all the ERCOT gates, except for that last gate, which is the approval to energize.”