The agency that runs the electric grid for most of Texas told the market at 7:16 p.m. on Aug. 31 — the last hours of the day it had promised an answer — that it would not meet its own deadline for telling utilities which enormous new electricity customers make the first round of grid connections.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) had committed in writing to notify the utilities of each large customer’s classification by Aug. 31. In a notice sent to every market participant that evening, it said instead: “ERCOT requires additional time to complete its data validation and due diligence processes. ERCOT is delaying the release of this information until later this week.” It gave no new date and said it would post another notice once the utilities have been told.
What is being decided is who gets to plug in. Texas is fielding requests from data centers, crypto operations and industrial plants that want to draw more power than entire cities, and far more of them have applied than the grid can absorb. The grid operator’s answer was a first-in-line group — it calls the group Batch Zero — that sorts which of those projects are far enough along, and backed by enough real commitment, to move ahead of everyone else. RTO Insider, a trade publication covering grid operators, has reported that ERCOT began the process with about 205,000 megawatts of proposed load. For scale, the most electricity Texas has ever used at one moment is 91,134 megawatts, set July 22 — the queue is more than twice the entire state’s record demand.
The deadline was not ERCOT’s alone to move. It came out of a good-cause exception the Public Utility Commission of Texas granted on Aug. 20, which let the grid operator run the first round on a compressed schedule rather than under the ordinary rulemaking timeline. The Dispatch reported on that schedule when it was set. The commission approved the underlying process in June, in what ERCOT described at the time as connecting large electricity users “while protecting system reliability for Texans.”
The distinction the classification turns on is a plain one, whatever the paperwork calls it. Some of these projects arrive with their own generation, their own water and their own money, and add capacity to a system that needs it. Others arrive with a load and an expectation that everyone else’s grid will carry it. Which category a project lands in — and whether it agrees to cut its own power when the grid is strained — is what the utilities are waiting to be told.
The delay lands in the middle of an unfinished rule. The commission’s rulemaking on large loads, opened to carry out the Legislature’s 2025 changes, is still open, and staff filed a 104-page memo on Aug. 24 with draft revisions to the proposed rule. No September agenda has been posted for the commission; its most recent open-meeting agenda on file is dated Aug. 28, and open meetings are scheduled for Sept. 11, 17, 18 and 25. Nothing new was filed in the large-load docket between Aug. 25 and Sept. 1.
The grid itself was quiet through the delay. ERCOT issued no conservation appeal, weather watch or emergency notice in the last week of August, and set no new demand record; the commission’s public grid indicator read “normal conditions” on Sept. 1. The operator’s attention was elsewhere on the coast, where CenterPoint Energy activated its emergency operations center on Aug. 31 and said it had mobilized 2,700 frontline workers ahead of a tropical system forecast to come ashore near the Texas-Louisiana line.
For the companies in the queue, the wait is not abstract. A classification determines whether a project can sign a contract to connect to the grid this year or next, which in turn determines whether it gets financed. For everyone else on the grid, the same decision determines how much new demand arrives, how fast, and on whose terms. ERCOT has now said it will answer “later this week.” It has not said which day.