The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says it plans to complete Governor Greg Abbott's ordered audit of data centers by December. ERCOT and the Public Utility Commission of Texas gave an update on the review at a commission meeting on August 20, 2026.
The grid operator said the week before that it planned to verify information submitted by roughly 250 to 300 large energy consumers in what it calls Batch Zero, the first group of data centers and other large loads to connect under new standards ERCOT approved earlier this year. ERCOT will also collect community impact information from Batch Zero applicants and from medium-sized consumers requesting between 25 and 75 megawatts. As of April 2026 the operator had identified 157 medium-sized consumers, including data centers and cryptocurrency miners, seeking a grid connection. In total the review could pull information from more than 400 large and medium consumers.
"It's a tremendous amount of information that's going to have to come back into ERCOT," said Chad Seely, an ERCOT senior vice president, at the meeting. "So as we look at the controls, we're looking from the technology side too and how to make this more efficient." He added that ERCOT should be able to "ingest all this information, analyze it and come back with some key reasonable findings for the commission, for the legislature and the governor's office."
Abbott directed the PUCT and ERCOT to evaluate energy and water usage, government assistance and tax incentives, facility ownership, and community impact. Facilities already under construction with approved interconnection, projects using their own generation with no grid tie, and sites outside the ERCOT grid are exempt.
Source: KERA News - https://www.keranews.org/texas-news/2026-08-21/ercot-says-it-plans-to-complete-governors-data-center-audit-by-december