ERCOT sets December deadline for data-center queue audit

ERCOT has put a date on Texas's data-center reckoning: December 10, when it will file the comprehensive report on the verification and audit process ordered by Gov. Abbott alongside a pause on new data-center interconnections, officials said Thursday. The pause could ripple through the long-term load forecast and the reliability assessment that underwrite the state's buildout.

ERCOT's interconnection queue requests now total about 474 GW, roughly 90 percent of that data centers, according to the governor's letter to the grid operator. The queue is more than five times ERCOT's record peak demand, and experts say a substantial portion may be speculative or duplicative. A queue of options is not a load forecast, and the grid operator is trying to learn, before it issues one, how much of its own pipeline is real.

About 300 data centers of 75 MW or larger are navigating the Batch Zero process, as Utility Dive first reported. At Thursday's meeting, Chad Seely, ERCOT's senior vice president of regulatory policy and general counsel, said the operator will send requests for information to all large loads provisionally qualified in Batch Zero starting as early as the end of August and continuing into September, with additional rounds in October and November. The target is a December 10 filing that delivers the comprehensive verification and audit report to the PUCT a week before its December open meeting.

ERCOT will also run a community impact review for data centers and crypto facilities of 25 MW and above, and it has sent utilities requests for information to update the baseline for medium-sized loads. Seely said an April snapshot counted 157 medium data center and crypto facilities representing almost 8,800 MW expected to come onto the grid at some point, and the operator wants a real-time baseline before the community impact RFIs go out.

The schedule is already slipping. The PUCT granted ERCOT good cause exceptions to the Aug. 7, 2026 Batch Zero classification deadline that Abbott's moratorium interrupted, but the operator has not asked regulators to move the deadline for the Batch Zero interconnection study results, telling the commission it does not yet know how the delay will affect the study timeline. Seely was direct: "We will not have the study done by April 9, 2027." Jefferies analyst Julien Dumoulin-Smith added in a research note that the Texas legislative session could delay things further.

For developers, the slipped study date carries the cost: every month the study moves is another month of carrying land and option payments without a route to power. None of this has stopped projects already past the technical gate, and Seely said ERCOT has 17 large loads, mostly data centers, that have gone through a stability assessment and are scheduled to come online later this year. Those are the projects with grid rights, and they are the benchmark against which the audit's RFI responses will be read.

The audit is, in effect, a mark-to-market of Texas's data-center queue, and this publication has argued that power has become the binding constraint on data-center construction. The corollary is that interconnection rights have become an asset class, and the December filing will show which rights are exercisable. Developers who can document a real offtaker, real site control, and a completed stability assessment will still build; the ones renting a place in line will be exposed, and every infrastructure investor underwriting Texas power should read it that way.