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.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, announced the demands in a market notice sent at 5:58 p.m. Sept. 9. It said it “has begun issuing Batch Zero Verification Requests for Information” — Batch Zero being the name ERCOT gives the first group of very large customers it will study for a grid connection — and that it “will continue to send RFIs out through the end of the month.”
The consequence for silence: “Failure to timely provide a complete response to any ERCOT RFI or failure to otherwise satisfy the verification requirements will result in the Large Load being excluded from ERCOT’s Batch Zero interconnection process.”
Being excluded matters because the line is long and the front of it is where the electricity is. ERCOT has stopped approving new data centers to switch on while it works through this review, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s September energy outlook. Seventeen large customers representing 6,608 megawatts of peak demand have finished every ERCOT process except the final permission to switch on, ERCOT told state regulators in an Aug. 20 presentation. A project that flunks this paperwork check does not simply lose its place; it waits to be studied in a future round.
The stake for everyone else is what those loads do to the system they join. Which projects get in, and in what order, sets how much new generation and how many new wires the rest of the state’s customers are asked to pay for, and how tight the margin gets on a hot August afternoon.
The rule applies to customers seeking 75 megawatts or more, the threshold the Legislature set in 2025. ERCOT wants the company that would use the power, the utility that would build the wires to it and the local distribution company each to swear to their answers in front of a notary. The attestation form ERCOT posted Sept. 2 requires an officer to certify “that, to the best of my knowledge, that information and documentation are true and accurate, and that, after all reasonable inquiry, all material information reasonably responsive to the request has been provided.”
The document list ERCOT posted Sept. 9 shows what it is actually checking: an executed property deed, proof of financial security, an ACH payment confirmation that cash collateral was posted, a letter of credit. In plain terms, the state’s grid operator is asking each of these projects to prove it owns the land it says it owns and has put up the money it says it has put up — the difference between a project that brings its own resources and one that leans on everyone else’s.
The scale of the doubt is on the record. ERCOT told the Public Utility Commission on Aug. 20 that it “has reviewed 290 dynamic models and approximately 18% were acceptable on first review” — dynamic models being the computer simulations a customer submits to show how its equipment will behave when the grid wobbles. It received 41 requests for exceptions to its deadlines on July 23 and said it will not carry forward 21 of them. A separate demand for information “about the state and community impacts of data centers” is still coming, ERCOT said, and will get its own notice.
Companies are already fighting for position on the public record. First Ammonia LLC, Octa Data Center Development Company LLC, Pallara Inc., Ionic Digital Inc. and two PowerHouse CloudPeak entities have all filed with the commission this summer in Project 59142, the commission’s review of how ERCOT handles these connections. The CloudPeak filing is captioned as a request for action on two specific projects it identifies by number.
One thing ERCOT said it had done, it apparently has not. The Sept. 9 notice states that ERCOT “has posted the questions for each interconnection path in the Batch Zero Verification RFI, along with the user guide” to its large load integration page. Neither the questions nor a user guide appears there. The newest file on the page is dated Sept. 9, and none of the 19 attachments is a question set. The same notice elsewhere says ERCOT “plans to publish a user guide” — future tense.
The first answers come due in late September. ERCOT has told regulators it will file its verification report on Dec. 10 and that the commission will take it up Dec. 17. Separately, the commission votes Sept. 11 on the state rule that would make these same customers post $50,000 for every megawatt they request, a requirement the Dispatch reported on Sept. 4 when regulators moved to soften what a departing customer forfeits. ERCOT missed its own deadline on Aug. 31 to say which of these customers made the first cut. It is now asking them to prove it.