Texas just acknowledged what everyone already knew: data centers are eating the grid alive, and the old way of plugging them in one at a time isn’t going to cut it anymore.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) on June 18 approved a new framework from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) called the Batch Zero process. It fundamentally changes how the state handles grid connection requests from large electricity consumers, grouping projects that need more than 75 MW into coordinated studies instead of processing each one individually.
The scale of the problem
Here’s the thing. ERCOT is currently tracking over 438 GW of large-load interconnection requests. To put that in perspective, the entire US grid capacity is roughly 1,300 GW. Texas alone has a queue that represents about a third of the country’s total generating capacity.
And nearly 89% of those requests come from data centers.
