Governor Greg Abbott wrote to the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and ERCOT on 3 August, directing a comprehensive verification and audit of every data centre advancing through the Texas interconnection process1. The letter went to PUCT chair Thomas Gleeson and ERCOT chief executive Pablo Vegas. PUCT regulates the state's utilities; ERCOT runs the grid serving roughly 90% of Texas. The audit covers ownership, public incentives, water use and community impact, and Abbott says projects that fail the state's existing water and power usage survey should be denied grid access2.
Ownership is the item Texas has never previously demanded of a queue position. An interconnection request costs a developer far less than a data centre does, so a queue can fill with positions held by parties who never intend to build. Nothing in the existing process asks who is behind a request, or what public money it has already drawn. Water use sits in the same category for a state that has been through repeated drought restrictions.
The letter names no batch, no docket and no individual project, and it directs rather than orders: PUCT is an independent commission and ERCOT answers to it. What Abbott has supplied is political cover for a slowdown, in a market whose selling point has been the speed of connection. The commission approved its classification framework in June against a queue of 438 GW, a figure larger than the peak demand of most national grids. Abbott's audit now has to establish how much of that queue exists.
