Following Texas's data center boom -- energy demands, water use, economic impact, and communities navigating rapid tech expansion.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday ordered the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to conduct a comprehensive verification and audit of every data center advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process — and to finish the audit before any additional data center is approved to move forward.
This week, the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers emerged as the single most urgent policy challenge before the Texas Legislature.
The state agencies that keep the lights on told a Senate panel Wednesday that Texas is planning for a grid nearly double the size of today’s — and that the surge is being driven by an unfamiliar customer: the data center.
A sales tax break that cost Texas an estimated $14.6 million a decade ago is now on track to cost the state roughly $3.3 billion in a single two-year budget — and on Monday the Senate’s budget-writing committee spent the better part of a nine-hour hearing asking whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.
The Texas Senate's Business and Commerce Committee meets Wednesday to review the state of the electric grid, and the item that will get the most attention on its agenda is the rulebook meant to keep a wave of new data centers from raising costs and risking reliability.
Governor Greg Abbott announced that Diode will not pursue a proposed data center near Cedar Creek Lake in Henderson County after the company determined the project did not meet the Governor’s directives or community expectations, according to a July 23 news release.
The Texas Senate Committee on Business and Commerce will take invited and public testimony July 29 on ERCOT reliability and Senate Bill 6's large-load rules, and on how a fast-expanding network of 765-kilovolt transmission lines will affect Texas landowners.
The agencies that run the Texas power grid have told Governor Greg Abbott they need new legal authority to keep the state's data-center boom from raising electric bills and threatening reliability — and, in one recommendation, to stop a hostile foreign government from using a data center to disrupt the grid.
Texas regulators have imposed the first hard operating requirement on the data centers crowding onto the state grid, and the industry is weighing whether to fight it in court.
Governor Greg Abbott's deadline for regulators to spell out how they will keep data-center costs off Texans' electric bills arrives Friday, but the state's push to rein in the industry is running into a problem it cannot regulate away: the calendar.