Texas grid operator ERCOT has about 226 gigawatts of large load customers in its interconnection queue as of November. That’s nearly quadruple what it reported at the end of 2024, at 63 GW.
About 77% of that load comes from large data centers aiming to connect to the power grid by 2030, ERCOT said in a filing ahead of its board meeting next week.
The interconnection requests far exceed the new power generation that ERCOT expects will come online in the coming years, fueling concerns about reliability. Between 2024 and 2025, about 23 GW of new generation capacity was added to the grid, ERCOT reported. Another nine GW is slated for early 2026.
However, determining how much load will actually come online is a major undertaking for utilities and grid operators, who are getting flooded with speculative or “phantom” load requests that may not materialize. This complicates their ability to plan for skyrocketing electricity demand from AI data centers.
Load requests don’t have standardized transparency requirements, unlike generation interconnection. That’s led industry experts to suspect that AI hyperscalers and other large energy users are submitting many load requests at once, then waiting and seeing what pans out first.
In July, Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott signed a law aimed at solving the queue confusion and ensuring that data centers and other large power users pay their fair share of grid infrastructure costs, including transmission lines. The law directed the state’s public utility commission to create new transparency requirements for large-load customers, including whether they have multiple similar interconnection requests under review in Texas. The PUC has until December 2026 to finish the rulemaking.
Matching new demand
Even if some of ERCOT’s large load requests don’t materialize, the grid operator will inevitably have to bring on new generation to keep up with growing demand from data centers, crypto miners, and industrial facilities.
In recent years, Texas has led the U.S. in getting new renewables online. According to a February report from BloombergNEF and the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, Texas added nearly 10 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2024. And of the 317 GW in renewables projects that applied to ISOs for interconnection last year, the majority were in Texas.
That said, the state has also put pressure on the industry to build more fossil fuel infrastructure to meet load growth. In 2023, Texas lawmakers created the Texas Energy Fund to spur the construction of new gas power plants, arguing that it would improve grid reliability. The state funneled up to $9 billion into the fund via low-interest loans and grants.
But as of early November, at least eight projects — representing around 35% of the capacity proposed initially — have withdrawn from the pipeline. The withdrawals were mainly due to a range of delays, including problems securing both permits and equipment. A data center-fueled run on gas turbines has driven up prices, and they are expected to get more expensive and scarcer over the next five years.
Most of the interconnection requests on the generation side are coming from solar and energy storage, according to ERCOT’s filing. There are about 432 GW of requests in the pipeline, and solar and energy storage account for 77%.
