The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved a plan to run a 180-megawatt data center directly off a Pecos County solar farm on Oct. 15, overruling the local wires utility, which had argued the grid study behind the deal was out of date and that the risk would land on its other customers. Two days earlier, ERCOT, the agency that runs the grid for most of the state, recommended approval of a far larger pairing: Amazon’s proposed 1,200-megawatt data center drawing on the Comanche Peak nuclear plant in Somervell County.
Both arrangements use a 2025 state law that lets a large new customer sit behind an existing power plant’s meter, so the plant’s output is netted against what the customer uses. ERCOT must study each pairing, and the commission then has 60 days to approve it, deny it or attach conditions. The Texas Dispatch previewed the Oct. 15 meeting and the September hearing on the Pecos County case.
The Pecos County order, signed by all four commissioners, allows Silver Basin Digital Infrastructure LLC to build its data center behind the connection point of Taygete II, a 204-megawatt solar farm owned by West Texas Solar Project II LLC. The 28-page order says it is the fourth such approval, after three earlier cases decided in April, May and July. Because the application was filed in December 2025, before the commission’s net metering rule took effect April 15, the commission said that rule’s requirements do not apply.
Texas-New Mexico Power Co., the utility with the legal right to deliver retail power at the site, fought the deal. According to the order, TNMP argued ERCOT had not done a fresh study but instead relied on two AEP Texas interconnection studies from 2023 that AEP has since superseded, had not examined a night with low wind and no solar, and had left unresolved overloads on the lines that import power into the Far West region. Without a current study, TNMP said, the risks of the arrangement shift to TNMP’s customers. The utility asked for eight extra conditions, including a bar on energizing the data center until ERCOT clears it through its new batch review of large loads, and a requirement that TNMP own a meter and breaker able to cut the data center off independently of the solar farm.
The commission rejected every one. It wrote that the Legislature gave ERCOT broad discretion over how to study these deals, that judging an application against studies done under the rules in force when it was filed is reasonable, and that doing otherwise would leave the commission “chasing a moving target” against the law’s 120-day and 60-day clocks. It also found that TNMP can serve as the delivery utility without owning equipment at the site, a position the commission said it had already taken when it wrote the net metering rule.
ERCOT’s study, filed in August, found no transmission violations under the conditions it tested, no stranded power lines, and a hit to the state’s planning reserve margin, the cushion of generating capacity above expected peak demand, of 0.11 to 0.31 percentage points each season from fall 2027 through winter 2030-31. The approval carries six conditions: within 30 minutes of an ERCOT instruction during a grid emergency, the data center must cut its use entirely and the solar farm must make all its available output available to ERCOT to dispatch, with the breakers opened if needed. The data center may not sell its ability to shut down into any ERCOT or utility demand response program, and the owners must return in three to five years for a review of the conditions. The order also directs that loads under such curtailment conditions be removed from the calculation of how much load their transmission operator must shed in a crisis, a point that answers one of TNMP’s requests.
The Comanche Peak case tests the same framework at ten times the size. Amazon Data Services Inc. plans to energize 100 megawatts in late 2027 and reach 1,200 megawatts, about the output of one of the plant’s two reactors, by late 2031, according to a schedule the plant’s owner gave ERCOT. ERCOT’s Oct. 13 study says Oncor’s engineers first concluded that serving more than 800 megawatts would require transmission upgrades, but a later analysis showed the problems could be managed by redispatching wind and solar generators, so the upgrades were dropped. ERCOT put the reserve margin impact at 0.09 to 0.83 percentage points through winter 2030-31, and estimated a 2.3-point reduction in fall 2031 and roughly 2.5 points the following winter, once the full load is drawing from a plant that today serves the whole grid.
ERCOT recommended approval with the same six conditions. Neither project adds new generation to the grid: one claims a solar farm that produces nothing after dark, the other claims a share of a nuclear plant that Texans have relied on since 1990. The commission’s answer so far has been to let the deals proceed while keeping the right to seize the power back in an emergency. By The Texas Dispatch’s count of the 60-day clock, the commission must rule on the Amazon arrangement by about Dec. 12.