Coverage of the Texas electric grid and energy sector -- ERCOT reliability, generation capacity, rising power demand, rates, and the policy decisions shaping how the state keeps the lights on.
David Thompson lives across the road from one of two data center campuses rising on San Antonio's far West Side, each with its own gas-fired power plant.
Gov. Greg Abbott's Sept. 21 order halting state permits for data centers reaches a group his first pause left alone: projects that plan to build their own power plants instead of solely drawing from the grid.
Public Utility Commission of Texas Commissioner Courtney Hjaltman has been appointed to the Advisory Council to the Board of Directors of the Electric Power Research Institute, according to a Sept. 23 news release from the PUCT.
On Sept. 30, a Texas House select committee will take testimony on a question no Texas Legislature has formally studied: whether the state can absorb counties that currently belong to New Mexico.
The Texas Senate Committee on Business and Commerce will gavel in at 9 a.m. Sept. 30 in Capitol Extension room E1.012 to take invited and public testimony on the rising cost of building and paying for transmission lines, the rollout of the new Texas Cyber Command and how online platforms sell concert and event tickets.
Texas lets a solar developer run a project for 20 years, and a wind developer for 10, before posting a dollar toward tearing it down.
A coalition of data center developers wants the Texas grid operator to change the rule that decides who gets shut off first when electricity runs short, and it is arguing that the state's largest new power customers will build outside the grid entirely if the answer stays no.
Two Panhandle landowners told state regulators on Sept. 14 that a power line projected to cost as much as $1.08 billion should not be built across Texas farmland at all, because the electricity demand driving it sits across the state line in New Mexico.
Every day, Texas oil and gas wells bring roughly 26 million barrels of salt water to the surface — more than a billion gallons.
About 1,200 feet from Heather Peysen's house on Three Way Road in Archer County, a company wants to build a data center that would pull 1,000 megawatts off the Texas grid — more than one percent of the record demand the entire state hit this summer.
The organization that runs the power grid for most of Texas told state regulators on Sept. 11 that it will send a survey of roughly 130 questions this week to 461 data center projects waiting to plug in, asking who owns them, where their water and cooling will come from, whether they can supply any of their own electricity, and what financial help they have sought from the communities around them.
The agency that runs the electric grid for most of Texas began sending formal demands for documents on Sept. 9 to the companies behind the giant power users it has tentatively placed at the front of the connection line, and warned that any one of them that fails to answer completely within 10 business days will be dropped from that line.
An Arizona company said Sept. 10 it will build what it calls the first end-to-end recycling plant for retired solar panels in the United States, on a 10-acre site near Dallas, and that it expects to start running it in the third quarter of 2027.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas announced the launch of ERCOT PowerCast, a monthly podcast built to walk listeners through the topics, decisions and people shaping the state’s electric grid.