Texas halts new data center connections amid electricity demand concerns

Texas just pulled the emergency brake on its data center boom. Governor Greg Abbott ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and grid operator ERCOT to stop approving new data center connections on August 3, freezing what had become the largest power-hungry queue in American history. The reason is almost comically simple: data centers are asking for more than five times the electricity Texas has ever actually used at once. The ERCOT interconnection queue now contains over 1,800 projects requesting a combined 474 GW of capacity. For context, the state’s all-time peak demand, set on July 22, hit 91,089 MW. Roughly 90% of those queued requests come from data centers. A queue that broke the system ERCOT responded to Abbott’s order by suspending its Batch Zero interconnection study, which was supposed to send notifications to project developers by August 7. That study was meant to be a first step toward sorting through the backlog. Now it’s on ice until a comprehensive audit of the entire queue wraps up. The governor framed this as a matter of protecting Texas ratepayers. The concern is that speculative projects, ones that may never actually get built, are clogging the pipe...