The Texas Oil and Gas Association published its July 2026 Month in Review on Aug. 3, a roundup the association said shows how TXOGA continued advocating for the Texas oil and natural gas industry over the past month.
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.
The organization that polices reliability standards on the ERCOT grid grades its own metrics on a traffic-light system.
This week, the expansion of artificial intelligence data centers emerged as the single most urgent policy challenge before the Texas Legislature.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has secured a settlement that vacates the federal government's listing of the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species, ending a rule his office said threatened Texas's oil and gas industry, the agency announced July 29.
AMERMIN, an Austin-based recycler and refiner of critical minerals, is renewing its call for federal export licensing on mill-ready tungsten scrap, warning in a July 29 news release that high-value material is leaving the country for overseas remanufacturing even as tungsten prices sit near record highs.
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.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas will consider three proposed behind-the-meter power arrangements for large electricity users, a new demand management framework for data centers and cryptocurrency mining operations, and several major electric utility rate cases during its Thursday meeting.
Two state administrative law judges have recommended that Texas regulators approve the Howard-Solstice 765-kilovolt transmission line along Route 4, a roughly 371-mile path estimated at about $2.18 billion, clearing one of the last procedural hurdles before the Public Utility Commission decides the case next month.
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.