The numbers sound almost implausible: more than 400 gigawatts of prospective new electricity users are asking to connect to the Texas grid — roughly four times the state’s all-time current demand — and the vast majority are data centers. Mark Bell, president and CEO of the Association of Electric Companies of Texas, says the grid is evolving to meet that demand without sacrificing reliability or shifting the cost onto households.
Bell brings more than 30 years of experience in and around the Texas Legislature and state government to the question. His association, founded in 1976 before the state deregulated its electricity market, represents wholesale generators, competitive retailers, and transmission and distribution utilities inside ERCOT, along with the vertically integrated utilities beyond it. “We cover every inch of the state,” he says.
Bell says rapid growth transformed the state’s electricity outlook long before artificial intelligence became a household topic. Since Winter Storm Uri in 2021, he notes, the Legislature has passed 73 significant pieces of electricity legislation — most of it aimed not at storm response but at demand growth and building for the future.
“For the last five years, Texas has been growing,” he says. “People want to live here and industry wants to locate here.” Data centers are simply “the latest evolution” of that trend, following expansion in the industrial sector in Southeast Texas and the oil and gas sector in the Permian Basin. Texas outperforms the nation in electricity demand growth every year, he says.
Still, Bell believes the most dramatic forecasts overstate the near-term challenge. Some of the load in ERCOT’s interconnection queue is speculative or duplicative — the same data center prospecting sites in Dallas and South Texas counts twice. “I don’t think we’ll get to those numbers in that period of time,” he says. “Eventually we will… just based on this trajectory.” His expectation: roughly 100 gigawatts of real new demand by 2030, on top of a current peak of about 85.5 gigawatts — still nearly a doubling of the grid in five years.
Lawmakers responded in 2025 with Senate Bill 6, which Bell describes as among the first laws in the country designed specifically to manage massive new electricity users. The law applies to customers demanding 75 megawatts or more and establishes “guardrails around how these large loads connect to the system,” he says, while improving forecasting, screening out duplicate requests through a new ERCOT “batch” study process, and allowing companies to build their own generation alongside the grid — an arrangement he calls “bring your own generation.” Bell says his members support it: “You’re essentially putting on… new generation for the state, for the reliability of the state.”
The question of who pays has moved to the front burner. Gov. Greg Abbott directed state utility regulators in June to ensure data centers fully fund the infrastructure built to serve them, with recommendations due to his office in July. Bell argues the framework is already taking shape.
Senate Bill 6 includes provisions intended to ensure that “these large loads pay their weight in terms of connection,” he says, and the Public Utility Commission is revising how transmission costs are allocated among customer classes — a technical change Bell says could lower the share residential customers carry. The goal, he says, is “making sure that everyone carries their weight… so that the residential consumer doesn’t pay an unfair, disproportionate share.”
On where the new electricity will come from, Bell points to the state’s competitive wholesale market rather than any single technology. “If the market signals are there, then they will build,” he says. “That’s the way the market works.” Texas leads the nation in wind power and recently overtook California as the top state for battery storage, and it accounts for more new utility-scale solar than any other state, alongside two nuclear plants and a large natural gas fleet.
Bell also pushes back on the notion that the state’s transmission buildout — including the new 765-kilovolt lines planned across West Texas — is a data center project. Those lines were designed before the data center boom, he says. “It’s to support oil and gas — it’s to support residential growth [and] commercial growth across the state… industrial growth.”
As for data centers themselves, Bell notes Texas already has more than 300 of them integrated into communities, and says their benefits extend beyond artificial intelligence. “They’re good for our economy. They’re good for the tax base. They’re good for our grid system,” he says. “They’re not just AI. It’s everything… banking, health care… Netflix… they’re processing large amounts of data that we all depend on every day.”
Despite the buildout, Bell says Texas still has among the most competitive electricity rates in the nation — he ranks the state 10th best — a claim consistent with federal data showing Texas residential rates run well below the national average.
“We’ve been integrating large loads into the system for years now and have been able to keep prices down,” he says. “We have an obligation to serve. We’re ready to serve.”