ERCOT, the agency that runs the power grid for most of Texas, told state regulators Monday that the audit of every data center waiting to plug into the grid will take several months — and asked permission to miss the deadlines its own rules set for sorting those projects. The filing, submitted August 10 to the Public Utility Commission of Texas, attaches a number the pause has been missing: 23 large projects that could lose their 2027 switch-on dates — not because anything is wrong with them, but because ERCOT missed its own deadline to sort them.
The grid operator was blunt about the rest: “ERCOT will not approve any authorizations to energize data center Large Loads until the verification and audit process is complete.” Nothing switches on until the audit clears it.
The audit was ordered by Governor Greg Abbott on August 3, in a letter directing the commission and ERCOT to verify every data center moving through the connection process before any more advance. ERCOT was then weighing roughly 474,000 megawatts of connection requests — several times the 91,300 megawatts the entire state has ever used at once — with data centers about 90 percent of it. ERCOT reads the governor’s order as covering cryptocurrency mining and other computing facilities too, the filing says.
The immediate casualty was an August 7 deadline. Under the rules the commission approved in June for a one-time study called Batch Zero — a first sorting of grid-connection requests of 75 megawatts or more into projects that are commercially real and projects that are not — ERCOT had to tell utilities by that date how each project was classified. Developers’ sworn statements that they met the readiness tests, such as site control, ordered equipment and posted financial security, reached ERCOT only on July 24. ERCOT had planned to check those statements during the study, as its rules allow. The governor’s letter requires the checking to come first, so the classification did not happen.
That stranded 23 projects. Six were expected in a quarterly grid-stability review dated August 1, with target switch-on dates between January and March 2027; another 17 are potentially eligible for the November 1 review, targeting April through June. Only projects already classified may be included. Without an exception, ERCOT wrote, those projects “would therefore be ineligible to energize on their projected energization dates solely because ERCOT has not completed the verification-dependent classification.” Being in the review does not authorize switching on — it only preserves the project’s place in line.
Some projects will not get that reprieve. ERCOT disclosed that 41 developers had asked to be excused from one or more of the eligibility rules, and that 21 of those requests seek relief from the requirement to have a qualifying connection study. ERCOT says that review closed July 10 and it will not reopen it or forward those 21 requests to the commission — leaving those projects out of Batch Zero unless they qualify by another route. The remaining requests, mostly over financial security and a filing deadline, fold into the audit, though ERCOT cautioned that inclusion implies nothing about the outcome.
The audit itself starts shortly after the commission’s August 20 meeting. ERCOT, working with its outside counsel, will send written information requests to developers through their utilities. A statement “false in any material respect,” or simple failure to answer, disqualifies the project.
Separately, ERCOT will collect the community-impact details the governor demanded — financial self-sufficiency, power supply, water use and cooling, mitigation, and ownership — from every unbuilt data center and mining facility of 25 megawatts or more. Of 258 mid-sized projects seeking connection by 2032, totaling 13,473 megawatts, about 157 are data centers or mining operations representing 8,766 megawatts. In plain terms, the questions ask whether a project brings its own power, water and money, or leans on everyone else’s.
The delay also freezes ERCOT’s demand forecast, and the filing shows why that forecast has been contentious. ERCOT’s preliminary numbers put peak demand at 278,003 megawatts in 2029 and 367,790 megawatts in 2032 — three and four times the state’s record — and ERCOT told the commission it had concerns about using them. The commission agreed in June to trim the forecast to verified Batch Zero base load; that now waits on the audit, delaying the forecast, a reliability assessment due in November, and possibly December’s supply-and-demand report. One date ERCOT did not ask to move: April 9, 2027, when the study results are due.
ERCOT drafted the order it wants signed and attached it. Its lawyers will be in the room for both the special meeting Friday and the August 20 meeting, where ERCOT has promised the audit’s full scope and timing — five days after the House State Affairs Committee takes up data centers.