The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says it intends to finish an audit of every data center seeking a connection to the Texas grid by December 10, 2026.
Governor Greg Abbott directed ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission of Texas to conduct the review in early August 2026. Roughly 300 planned data centers currently sitting in the interconnection queue fall within its scope.
The audit gathers information on whether each project pays its own way, whether it supplies its own power or relies on the grid, whether it brings or reuses its own water rather than drawing on local supplies, what measures it takes to reduce impacts on neighboring property owners, and who owns and controls it. Completing the review is a prerequisite for the ERCOT Batch Zero study process to continue and for large load grid interconnections to resume.
Chad Seely, ERCOT senior vice president of regulatory policy, general counsel and chief compliance officer, said a comprehensive verification and audit report goes to the Public Utility Commission one week before its December open meeting. "We expect to start sending those out as early as the end of the month, and into the first part of September, and then as we move forward into October and November, there may be additional rounds of RFIs," Seely said.
ERCOT is weighing more than 474 gigawatts of connection requests, over five times the state record peak electricity demand, and about 90 percent of that total is attributed to data center load. Reports suggest up to 20 percent of the entire United States data center pipeline could be delayed by the review. The audit touches nearly 49.8 gigawatts of projects, with financial impact potentially above $8 billion by the first quarter of 2027.
Source: DataCenterDynamics - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/ercot-to-complete-texas-data-center-audit-by-december/