ERCOT, the Texas grid operator, told an April 2026 state Senate hearing that more than 225 GW of large electricity loads are in formal interconnection study, with over 70 per cent from data centres. A further 137 unposted requests totalling roughly 140,000 MW would push the working total toward 380 GW if and when they hit the public queue chart. ERCOT received 225 new large-load requests during 2025 alone against an interconnection process designed to handle 40 to 50 at a time.
ERCOT is not synchronised with the Eastern or Western Interconnection, which means it falls outside FERC jurisdiction. Operators looking to escape the federal layer have begun routing capacity through West Texas already, and the 9.1 GW of crypto-mining brownfield infrastructure across the Midland-Abilene corridor is the brownfield route. Crypto sites already have grid connections, building shells, and cooling rated for high-density compute; converting that load class to AI inference and training is faster than greenfield construction by 18 to 24 months. xAI's 41 turbines at Memphis sit on the same behind-the-meter logic, but operators copying that play now have to find a turbine slot before they find a site, and the queue runs to 2031.
McKinsey has been contracted to deliver a short- and mid-term solutions framework for ERCOT, with a streamlined batch-study implementation expected to follow. The March 2026 Large Load Working Group meeting focused on flexible-interconnection models that allow loads to come online with curtailment commitments instead of full firm-capacity rights. The interaction with the FERC June order is straightforward: every operator who can route through ERCOT is doing so, every operator who cannot is waiting to see whether RM26-4-000 cuts the wait or extends it. The queue grows in either case, because the structural attractiveness of a non-FERC grid does not turn on a single rule cycle.
