MANY MINDEDArs Technica catches up with the Texas grid pause
This is a second outlet's account of a story this site carded on August 4, and it is marked as a duplicate so the sector index counts it once.
The substance: Texas has paused approvals for new large-load grid connections, including data centres, while regulators audit an interconnection queue that has reached roughly 474 GW of requested capacity — several times the state's actual peak demand, which set a record of 91.1 GW last month. A governor who promoted Texas as the epicentre of American AI is now the governor who stopped connecting it.
The reason it stays significant on a second telling is that the queue figure is the tell. When requests run to five times peak demand, the queue has stopped being a measure of demand and become a measure of speculation, and no operator can plan against it. The pause is what a grid does when it cannot distinguish the projects that will be built from the ones that were filed as options.
Read alongside today's card on PJM asking FERC for the power to curtail data centres that do not bring their own capacity, the pattern is that the two largest American grid regions moved within days of each other, and both moved toward rationing rather than building.
Source: Ars Technica