MANY MINDEDTexas stops the queue: 474 gigawatts go to audit
Governor Greg Abbott announced on 3 August that data-centre approvals in Texas are halted until regulators audit the projects seeking to connect to the state grid. He directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to require developers to disclose the tax incentives they receive, their power consumption and generation, their water use and cooling operations, their efforts to reduce local impact, and the ownership of the facility. Projects that fail the audit are to be denied a grid connection. ERCOT responded by pausing the batch zero transmission planning study already under way.
The queue is the reason. ERCOT is tracking more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts — roughly five times the grid's record peak demand — and about 90 percent of those requests are data centres. Texas already has 335 operating data centres, second only to Virginia, with at least 248 more planned. Abbott pointed at compliance as the trigger: of 377 companies notified about a survey on water and power usage, 28 responded.
This is the largest brake yet applied to the American compute build-out, and it did not come from chips or capital. It came from a grid operator being asked to plan around requests five times larger than anything it has ever served, by companies that mostly did not answer the survey. Cheap intelligence has an electricity bill, and it is now being itemised in public.
Caveats matter here. No end date was given for the audit. Data centres that build their own generation can bypass ERCOT entirely, the ERCOT region excludes parts of the state such as El Paso, and critics note a governor's directive carries less force than a legislated moratorium.
Source: Texas Tribune