Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on approvals for new data centers seeking to connect to the state's electric grid, directing the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT, the grid operator, to audit the projects first [1]. Following the directive, ERCOT put its batch-zero review on hold.
The scale explains the alarm. ERCOT's interconnection queue, the line for large projects that want to plug into the grid, holds more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts of potential demand. That is more than five times the grid's record for peak demand. Abbott said roughly 90% of the new power requests come from data centers, the warehouses of servers that run cloud and AI workloads.
Much of that queue may not be real. A state survey asking data-center companies about their water and power use went to 377 firms, and only 28 responded. A queue swollen with projects that will not answer basic questions is exactly what an audit is meant to sort out. Abbott's letter directs the agencies to require reporting on proposed water use, tax breaks, cooling technology and who owns each project, and to deny grid connection to any that do not comply.
Abbott framed the pause as a matter of protecting residents first. "Our top priority is to protect Texans' safety and quality of life. Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first," he said.
The throughline connects this story to the earnings that dominate the business page. The same AI demand lifting chipmakers and software firms shows up here as physical load on a grid, and Texas is the place where that abstraction becomes megawatts. Ratepayers and grid reliability stand to gain if the audit strips out placeholders from a 474-gigawatt queue. Data-center developers, and the jobs attached to genuine projects, absorb the delay while the state figures out which of the 377 it can trust.
