Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s announced order this month means nearly 300 data center and other power-hungry industrial projects in the state will have to be audited and verified.
“Our top priority is to protect Texans’ safety and quality of life,” said Governor Abbott in his August 3 announcement. “Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT, and by state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid. Simply put, Texans must come first.”
His order stated, “The PUCT and ERCOT must complete this audit before any data center project moves forward. Any project that fails to comply with the requirements set forth by the PUCT and ERCOT will be denied connection to the Texas grid.”
Officials of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas testified last week before the state’s Public Utility Commission explaining such an order will take months to complete. An estimated 250 to 300 projects fall under the governor’s order and most of them are data centers.
The Texas Tribune reported the 200 gigawatts of future demand accounted for by the projects that will be audited is more than twice the ERCOT grid’s peak demand record set last month.
It will take the Electric Reliability Council of Texas “several months” to audit the projects, which must be completed before any data center can be approved for connection to the state grid, according to Abbott’s Aug. 3 directive to ERCOT and the PUCT. ERCOT had already planned on assessing large load projects seeking to connect to the grid as a part of a process already underway, but Abbott’s audit order moves up the checks to first priority and adds some more requirements, officials said.
“With the governor’s letter, what we’re really doing is moving that verification process now to the front of the line before we begin the interconnection study process,” said Chad Seely, general counsel and senior vice president of regulatory policy for ERCOT.
The Texas PUC held its first public discussion last week with ERCOT leaders regarding the governor’s order to pause data center approvals, an order issued over the public backlash to the accelerating buildout of the facilities statewide.
As the Tribune reported, the meeting clarified that the audit is limited to projects under consideration in ERCOT’s “Batch Zero” study, or the process the grid operator has been undertaking since the start of the year. The study aims to organize its grid approval process as more than 1,800 individual projects — 90% of which are data centers — overwhelmed the queue in recent years.
The work involved in Abbott’s audit directive was already planned under the Batch Zero study — it just adds a few more standards data center projects have to meet, ERCOT officials said. Spot checks were going to be conducted on the 250 to 300 projects eligible in the first batch of projects moving through the queue, and ERCOT is now planning to simply conduct those checks now before moving ahead with the rest of the study.
