The Public Utility Commission of Texas is set to vote Sept. 11 on the permanent rule for connecting the state’s largest new electricity users to the grid. The version staff put on the table Sept. 3 would sharply reduce what a data center or crypto mine loses if it reserves a place in line and then walks away.
Under the recommended final order, filed in Project 58481 at 5:36 p.m. Sept. 3 and running 280 pages, a company seeking to connect a load of 75 megawatts or more must still post a deposit of $50,000 for every megawatt it wants. What changes is how much of that money it never gets back. The rule as proposed in March would have kept 80 percent if the customer pulled out after the grid operator had set aside transmission capacity for it. The version headed to a vote keeps 20 percent — and returns the deposit in full if the customer withdraws before the engineering study even begins.
That difference decides who pays for planning that turns out to be unnecessary. Every request from a giant new customer sends engineers at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the agency that runs the grid for most of the state, into months of study, and can cause transmission lines to be sized for demand that never arrives. The deposit is the mechanism that makes the company bringing the load carry some of that cost rather than leaving it on everyone else’s bill. Cutting the forfeit by three-quarters moves that balance toward the companies.
The commission credited three of them by name for the change — Black Mountain Power, Skybox and the Texas Energy Buyers Alliance — and went further, striking a separate connection fee altogether. “The commission also modifies the adopted rule to remove the interconnection fee,” the order says. Security commitments will now overlap rather than stack, a change Oncor asked for.
Oncor lost the argument that mattered more to it. The utility asked the commission to delete the section requiring large customers to make an upfront cash payment for equipment built solely to serve them. The commission refused. “It is not appropriate to socialize costs associated with equipment, facilities, and services that do not benefit the public as a whole,” the order says. The Permian Basin Petroleum Association also lost, failing to win an exemption for oil-and-gas loads under 75 megawatts inside the Permian Basin Reliability Plan; the commission called the request “outside the scope of the adopted rule.”
The rule carries out Senate Bill 6, the 2025 law written after a run of data-center announcements far larger than anything the grid had planned for. The order notes how much of that announced demand is real: of roughly 39 gigawatts of large loads announced, “only 1.35 GW of capacity were under construction as of May 2026.” Fewer than four announced megawatts in a hundred have turned into steel in the ground.
The vote comes two days after the grid operator finally sorted the first wave of those customers. On Sept. 3 at 3:55 p.m., ERCOT told utilities it had issued conditional classifications for what it calls Batch Zero — the first group of giant loads to be studied under the new law — three days after missing its own Aug. 31 commitment. The notice sets hard clocks: utilities have two business days to tell an affected customer, and a customer that fails to prove it qualifies gets 14 business days before its request is pushed into a future study cycle.
ERCOT published no list, no megawatt total and no names. It did disclose one thing. Some companies had asked the grid operator to seek a waiver on their behalf from the commission, and ERCOT has decided which of those it will not carry forward. “ERCOT will not seek a good cause exception for every Large Load that requested it,” the notice says. “The good cause exceptions that ERCOT will not pursue have been provided to the Interconnecting DSP/TSP” — that is, to the utilities, and not to the public.
The classifications are provisional, and disputes are already running. The commission takes up the permanent rule as Item 24 on its Sept. 11 agenda, the same meeting at which it is scheduled to decide three 765,000-volt transmission cases.