Texas energy regulators set mid-December deadline for data center and crypto-mining project reviews

Texas regulators have drawn a line in the sand for data centers and crypto miners hoping to tap into the state’s power grid. The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) have set December 10, 2026, as the deadline for operators to prove their interconnection projects are real, funded, and ready to build. The verification requirement means operators must hand over ownership records, site access permissions, purchase orders, and contracts. A queue that got out of hand By late 2025, ERCOT was tracking roughly 226 GW of large-load interconnection requests. Approximately 474 GW of total interconnection requests have been submitted to ERCOT, with around 90% attributed to data centers. Crypto-mining operations account for a notable but smaller slice of the pie. Large-load requests, defined as those requiring 75 MW or more of power, have been piling up as artificial intelligence workloads, cloud computing demand, and Bitcoin mining operations have all converged on Texas. The problem is that submitting an interconnection request is easy. Regulators grew concerned that a significant portion of the queue consisted of speculative or zombie...