ERCOT told Texas legislators its large-load interconnection queue has reached 410 GW, with roughly 87 per cent of it data centres1. ERCOT, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, runs about 90 per cent of the state grid. The figure comes from its own presentations to the Senate Committee on Business and Commerce on 1 April and the House Committee on State Affairs on 9 April. It is up from the 225 GW ERCOT logged weeks earlier, and it sits at nearly five times the state's 85 GW peak demand.
The requests keep coming; the iron to serve them will not arrive in time. PwC analysts, via pv-magazine, put average large power transformer lead times at 128 weeks, with some orders quoted at four years2. That tracks GE Vernova's backlog, which grew to 100 GW with deliveries booked into 2029 before the firm added $5bn of transformer capacity through its Prolec deal. An order placed now arrives in 2028 at the earliest.
Industry trackers put close to half of US data-centre builds already delayed or cancelled on supply-chain grounds. ERCOT's connection-friendly rules let developers queue cheaply, so the 410 GW figure measures appetite, not committed demand. The transformer book measures what can actually be fed. When requests run at 410 GW and deliverable hardware runs at a fraction of that, the queue stops measuring intent and starts measuring who secured a slot.
