ERCOT spent this week doing two things at once that do not obviously fit together. On Tuesday it told everyone the grid will sail through a record summer. On Monday and Tuesday its board voted to ration access to that same grid, because the queue of people who want on it has reached a number that is not real. The summer peak it is planning for is 92,211 MW. The data center load that asked to interconnect in the first few months of this year is 438,000 MW. One of those numbers is a forecast. The other is a fantasy with a cover letter.

That gap — between what Texas can deliver and what Texas has been asked to deliver — is the whole story right now, and this week it turned into a question about authority. Who gets to say yes. Who gets to say no. ERCOT is building itself a triage desk. Hyperscalers are routing around the desk entirely by bringing their own generation. And the communities at the bottom of the stack are discovering, in El Paso and in Hood County, exactly how little "no" they actually own.

92,211 MW, and ERCOT Is Calling Its Shot

Start with the number ERCOT actually stands behind. In its summer outlook released June 3, the grid operator forecast an all-time peak of 92,211 MW, nearly 10% above last summer's 83,679 MW and about 8% above the standing record of 85,464 MW set in 2023. And then it did something it has not done comfortably in years: it said the grid will hold. ERCOT puts the probability of a grid emergency at 0.09% in June and 0.21% in July, on the strength of roughly 11 GW of new capacity — overwhelmingly solar and batteries — added in the last few months.

The composition of the record is the part worth sitting with. This is not an air-conditioning peak inching up with the heat index. ERCOT attributes the growth to industrial load — crypto mining, oil and gas electrification, LNG export terminals, and data centers. The Texas peak has stopped being a weather event and become a balance-sheet event. That is good news for anyone selling firm capacity into ERCOT and a structural problem for anyone who assumed the demand curve would behave like it did in 2015.

438 GW Walked In. ERCOT Built a Door.

Here is the number nobody stands behind. In the first few months of 2026, nearly 200 data centers and large users asked to connect to the Texas grid, seeking a combined 438 GW — more than five times the entire state's record demand. ERCOT will tell you plainly that most of it will never be built. The problem is that under the old individual-study model, the speculative requests and the real ones moved through the same pipe at the same speed, and the pipe stopped working.

So on June 2 the board voted to approve the framework that allocates transmission capacity only to large loads that are, in ERCOT's words, "studied and committed" — a batch-study process that screens for the unglamorous evidence a project is real: site control, financing, an actual customer. The framework now goes to the PUCT for final sign-off. Strip away the procedure and the meaning is blunt: ERCOT has appointed itself the body that decides which AI ambitions get to count. When the queue is five times the grid, gatekeeping is not bureaucracy. It is the product.

Air-Cooled and Half Off-Grid: Google Builds Its Own Yes

If the queue is the bottleneck, the obvious move is to skip the queue. On June 4, Google and Intersect Power broke ground on the Meitner Energy Center in Gray and Roberts Counties, a Panhandle data center co-located with more than 1 GW of wind, solar, storage, and on-site gas for firming. It is the first project since Google closed its roughly $4.75 billion acquisition of Intersect in March, and the second Google-Intersect co-location in Texas after the Haskell County solar-and-storage build.

The design reads like a checklist of every objection Texas data centers have collected over the past year. It is air-cooled — restroom-level water use, in a region where water is the fight. It comes with an 800-acre workforce hub for up to 3,500 construction workers and a $10 million Texas Water Impact Fund. Google is not just building the power next to the load to dodge the interconnection queue. It is pre-buying the social license to dodge the second queue — the one made of neighbors. Build your own generation, build your own goodwill, and you never have to ask ERCOT or the county for permission you might not get.

El Paso Tries to Take a Yes Back

Which brings us to the neighbors, who are done asking nicely. On June 2, El Paso District 2 representative Josh Acevedo put an item on the June 9 council agenda to terminate the Chapter 380 incentive agreement with Meta for its $10 billion data center in Northeast El Paso. The facility broke ground last October and is designed to run behind-the-meter on 366 MW from 813 modular gas generators — roughly $473 million of equipment — for a five-year bridge period before any grid connection.

The city pushed back within 24 hours, warning that tearing up an executed agreement has no clear legal basis and could expose taxpayers to more than $1 billion in liability. This is a different animal than the zoning fights and one-year moratoriums we have covered before. Those were communities trying not to say yes. El Paso already said yes, in writing, and is now trying to find the unsay button. The behind-the-meter gas — 813 engines running off-grid in a city with air-quality problems — is what turned an incentive deal into a recall campaign. The vote is June 9.

Hood County Has No Off-Switch to Reach For

El Paso at least has a contract to fight over. Hood County has almost nothing. The Texas Tribune this week mapped eight proposed data centers across more than 7,600 acres — roughly 12 square miles — of the rural county southwest of Fort Worth. The flagship Comanche Circle development and its two siblings could draw up to 3 GW at full build, enough for about three million homes, and would need a 95-million-gallon initial fill plus 150,000 gallons a day after that. Hood County now ranks sixth among Texas counties by planned data centers.

The commissioners court rejected a development pause, and here is the thing: even if it had wanted to stop the projects, it largely cannot. Texas gives unincorporated counties almost no zoning authority. This is not an oversight developers are exploiting by accident — it is the entire reason rural, unincorporated land is the preferred address. Google picked unincorporated Panhandle counties for Meitner for the same structural reason. The places with the least power to say no are, predictably, the places being asked the loudest. That is not a coincidence. That is the siting strategy.

What to Watch Next Week

El Paso council, June 9. Acevedo's motion to kill the Meta agreement either dies in committee, gets tabled, or forces the city to litigate its own incentive deal against that $1 billion liability warning. Whatever happens, it sets the template for every Texas city that wrote a Chapter 380 check it now regrets.

The PUCT's move on Batch Zero. The board approved the framework; the Commission has to finalize it. Watch for the feasibility criteria — exactly how much site control and financing a project must show to keep its place — and how fast the 438 GW gets winnowed once the screen is live.

SB6 final rule. The large-load interconnection rule under Project 58481 is on track for adoption by mid-year, including the 75 MW threshold and the $50,000-per-MW non-refundable fee. That fee is the cheapest, bluntest filter ERCOT has — watch how much of the speculative queue simply declines to pay it.

The first real heat. June and July will test the 92,211 MW forecast against actual load, and the roughly 15 GW of installed batteries against the moment they were built for. ERCOT called its shot in public. The thermometer gets a vote.

County zoning authority. Hood County's powerlessness is becoming a legislative talking point. Watch for noise about giving counties large-load review authority ahead of the 2027 session — the single change that would most alter where these projects get built.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

Some weeks the news is what got built. This week the news is what got killed. A 900 MW campus in Hanover County died on a 4-3 vote. Central Arkansas froze new data centers for a year. A 2.6 million-square-foot adaptive-reuse in the Lehigh Valley got denied from the bench. And the only clean transaction that printed was a Singapore REIT walking away from a powered-but-stranded Philadelphia box for $14.5 million, because it couldn't get the megawatts to make the building worth keeping.

The 2026 bottleneck was never money and it was never chips. It is the social license to interconnect, and this week proved it is getting harder to buy at any proffer price. So capital did the rational thing: it refinanced the megawatts it already controls, dumped the ones it can't make denser, and kept the genuinely new builds small enough to fly under the zoning radar. Here is the week, lead with the deal that actually closed.

$14.5 Million for a Box That Can't Get Bigger: Mapletree Exits Byberry at a Premium to Book

Singapore's Mapletree Industrial Trust signed a PSA to offload its vacant two-story data center at 2000 Kubach Road, in far Northeast Philadelphia's Byberry West Industrial Park, for $14.5 million — a 4.3% premium over the asset's $13.9 million March-31 book value. On paper that is a win: a vacant 1993-vintage building, dark since the last lease rolled off at the end of 2024, sold above carrying value. Read the manager's own language and it is something colder.

Mapletree cited "lengthy lead times to secure higher power capacity" and construction risk as the reason it could not reposition the asset. Translation: the building has a slab, a roof, and a fiber path, but no realistic route to the density a 2026 tenant demands, and the cost of getting there made redevelopment a worse bet than a clean exit. That is the tell of the cycle. Powered-but-underbuilt legacy boxes without a credible path to higher kW are no longer redevelopment plays — they are inventory you sell to someone with a higher risk appetite, at roughly $117 a foot on net lettable area. The premium-to-book headline is the polite version of "we're out."

Deal specs. Sponsor: Mapletree Industrial Trust (seller); buyer undisclosed · Site: 2000 Kubach Road, Byberry West, far NE Philadelphia, within city limits (~15 mi NE of Center City) · Footprint: ~124 ksf two-story on ~25 acres freehold · Load: n/d (power-constrained, vacant since end-2024) · Power density: n/d · Lease: outright asset sale, vacant possession, ~$117/sf · Deal value: $14.5M (4.3% premium to $13.9M book) · Source: DCD.

Hanover Says No to 900 MW: Tract's $21 Million in Proffers Wasn't Enough

This one is over our usual 75 MW line, and it belongs here for a single reason: it is the benchmark that prices everyone else's land. On May 28 the Hanover County, Virginia Board of Supervisors voted 4-3 to reject Denver-based Tract's rezoning for the 900 MW, ~430-acre Mountain Road Technology Park near the Henrico line — roughly 20 miles northwest of downtown Richmond. Tract did not lose on price. It stacked more than $21 million in proffers onto the application — a $15 million pump station and water tank, $6 million for conservation and parks — and still couldn't clear a suburban board staring at 600,000 gallons a day of average water draw, two million at peak.

When a developer puts eight figures of community infrastructure on the table for entitlement and the answer is still no, the marginal cost of the next exurban-NoVA megawatt just went up for everyone. The story for the mid-size operator is the spillover: deals that would have penciled in Hanover or Henrico now go shopping in secondary metros with slack utilities and boards that haven't yet learned to count gallons. The Hanover vote is a ceiling, and ceilings are comps.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Tract (Denver powered-land developer) · Site: 13074 Mountain Road, western Hanover County, VA, near the Henrico line (~20 mi NW of downtown Richmond) · Footprint: ~430 acres entitled (building sf n/d) · Load: 900 MW planned · Power density: n/d (building sf not disclosed) · Lease: rezoning application — denied 4-3 · Other: ~$21M in proffers; 600k gal/day avg water, 2M peak · Source: DCD.

A One-Year Freeze in Little Rock — and Why Being Already in the Queue Just Got Valuable

On May 26 the Pulaski County, Arkansas Quorum Court enacted a 12-month moratorium on new data centers across greater Little Rock. The interesting part is the amendment: the court grandfathered two existing proposals it had only learned about at the early-May agenda meeting, where AVAIO Digital, Entergy Arkansas, and Central Arkansas Water all presented and at least one justice of the peace called the developers' answers "evasive."

For dealmakers the lesson is clean. Optionality on entitled or in-flight sites just repriced upward, because late entrants in Central Arkansas are locked out for a year while the two grandfathered projects keep their place. Site control with a live application is no longer just a head start — in a moratorium county it is the only ticket in the building. Expect to see "already in process" show up as a line item in how powered land gets marketed for the rest of 2026.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Pulaski County Quorum Court (ordinance); developer referenced: AVAIO Digital; utility: Entergy Arkansas · Site: Pulaski County, AR (greater Little Rock) · Footprint: n/d · Load: n/d · Power density: n/d · Lease: 12-month moratorium with grandfather carve-out for two pending projects · Source: THV11.

Hut 8 Cuts Its Bitcoin Loan to 7%, Frees $260 Million, and Backstops a $16.8 Billion Lease Book

If you couldn't close new megawatts this week, the next-best move was to make the ones you already control cheaper to hold. On May 27 Hut 8 refinanced its Bitcoin-backed credit facility into a $200 million, 364-day line with FalconX at a fixed 7.0% — 200 basis points below the prior Coinbase facility — and released roughly 3,300 BTC, about $260 million of collateral. The same disclosure reaffirmed $16.8 billion of contracted AI lease revenue across the company's hyperscale book, anchored by the 352 MW Beacon Point campus in Nueces County, Texas and the 245 MW River Bend site.

This is the crypto-pivot playbook running exactly as designed. Use cheap, BTC-collateralized bridge capital to fund AI build-out instead of diluting equity into a soft tape, and let an unnamed high-investment-grade tenant's contracted cash flows carry the story. The interesting number isn't the $200 million — it's the 200 basis points. When a miner-turned-landlord can shave its cost of bridge capital that fast, the financing market is telling you it still believes the AI lease book even in a week when the zoning market doesn't. The full facility terms are in the release.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Hut 8 Corp. (borrower); FalconX (lender, replacing Coinbase Credit) · Site: corporate facility; underlying book includes Beacon Point, Nueces County, TX · Footprint: n/a (financing) · Load: 597 MW contracted (352 MW Beacon Point + 245 MW River Bend) · Structure: $200M, 364-day BTC-backed revolver, fixed 7.0% (down from 9.0%), ~3,300 BTC / ~$260M freed · Tenant credit: unnamed high-investment-grade hyperscaler · Deal value: $16.8B contracted AI lease revenue referenced · Source: PR Newswire.

200 Kilowatts, Zero Water, on Leased School-District Land: The Edge Playbook in Lubbock

Here is the week's one genuinely new build, and it is the opposite of everything above. On May 28 Duos Edge AI cut the ribbon on two modular edge data centers near 19th Street and Avenue Q in central Lubbock, Texas — its fifth Texas market after Corpus Christi, Victoria, Amarillo, and Waco. Total capacity: 200 kilowatts, what the operator's own VP of technology compared to the draw of a McDonald's. Fifteen rentable cabinets, air-cooled, no water meter, no pipes, sited deliberately close to the grid tie so it doesn't load the neighbors.

This is why the sub-megawatt edge model keeps clearing while the 900 MW campuses get voted down. Nobody packs a zoning hearing over 200 kW. There's no water fight when there's no water. The land is a ground lease from Lubbock ISD — the school district confirmed it is the landlord, not a customer — which keeps Duos's capital light and its siting flexible. Two pods at roughly a million dollars each is a rounding error next to Beacon Point, but it is a deal that actually opened this week, and Duos has five more Texas open houses booked through July plus a Savannah, Georgia expansion. In a week defined by the word no, inner-ring edge is where yes still lives. The Lubbock opening is the template.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Duos Edge AI (Duos Technologies Group, Nasdaq: DUOT) · Site: 19th St & Avenue Q, central Lubbock, TX, within city limits; land leased from Lubbock ISD · Footprint: two modular pods, 15 cabinets (sf n/d) · Load: 200 kW (0.2 MW) max; ~13.3 kW/cabinet · Power density: n/d (sf not disclosed) · Lease: ground-lease tenant; retail colo — space + conditioned power + cross-connect · Tenant credit: small-cap Nasdaq operator; colo customers n/d · Deal value: ~$1M+ per pod · Source: KCBD.

What to Watch Next Week

Walton County, FL takes a first reading on an outright AI data-center ban June 9. Commissioners directed staff to draft a ban before any project has even been proposed. Watch whether they get it on the books ahead of the July state-AI-law preemption that could strip local authority.

Iron County, UT votes on the 640-acre Pronghorn/Antelope project June 4. It moves as a grandfathered project under the county's new 180-day moratorium, but water rights in Basin 71 are already fully appropriated — the supply question, not the zoning, is the one to read.

Ohio's Tax Credit Authority holds its June 1 meeting before Governor DeWine's sales-tax-exemption pause bites. The exemption cost the state $1.6 billion in 2025, roughly eleven times the original estimate. Expect a rush of last-minute approvals and watch the Select Committee on Data Centers' testimony schedule for where the next incentive regime lands.

RadiusDC's phoenixNAP acquisition is expected to close in Q2. A sub-75 MW metro-edge M&A — the Phoenix campus scales toward ~26 MW — that sits squarely in this newsletter's beat. Watch for the closing announcement and any disclosed price; mid-market colo comps are scarce and this one would set one.

Stack Infrastructure's Berry Hill site in Pittsylvania County, VA hits a land-closing milestone. The performance agreement cleared in mid-May; the first 1,000-plus-acre phase must close by June 2027. Watch the tax-abatement conditions and any phased-MW disclosure that would set a Southside Virginia benchmark — the secondary metro that catches Hanover's spillover.

Disclaimer: Edge Cases is Barrio Energy's deal-flow product. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation to transact, or a substitute for your own diligence. Specs are sourced from public filings, press, and reporting; verify before you wire anything.

ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue closed May at roughly 238,000 megawatts, north of 70 percent of it data centers. On Wednesday, a developer in Hill County took $80 million of land, 1,235 megawatts of planned load, and a one-year county moratorium and filed all three of them in U.S. District Court in Waco. The complaint calls the county's freeze "illegal under Texas law." It is asking a federal judge to say so.

This is the gap the rest of the year is going to be about. ERCOT has a paper queue an order of magnitude larger than the grid can serve. Counties are starting to use their zoning authority to slow it down. The grid operator is about to chop the queue with a one-shot Batch Zero filing window. Turbine OEMs are sold out past 2029. And the developers that are actually going to energize something in 2026 are the ones writing $96 million preferred-equity checks and buying combined-cycle sets off the shelf.

Five stories from the past seven days, all pointing at the same thing: the difference between what's announced and what's built keeps getting wider, and the people closing that gap are doing it one ITC transfer and one Siemens SGT800 at a time.

"Illegal Under Texas Law": RCM Hill Drops a $100 Million Federal Complaint on Hill County

RCM Hill, LLC filed suit Wednesday in the Western District of Texas, Waco Division, against Hill County and its five commissioners over the county's May 12 data-center moratorium. The developer says it has spent more than $80 million assembling 800-plus acres across four landowner contracts at roughly $100,000 an acre, plus another $1 million in due diligence, to site a 1,235 MW campus it calls Project Aquila. The complaint asks for damages "in excess of $100 million" and a preliminary injunction against the moratorium.

The legal theory is the interesting part. RCM Hill is arguing the freeze is a regulatory taking under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, that the county exceeded its statutory authority under the Texas Local Government Code, and that the moratorium's stated public-purpose findings are pretextual. Senator Paul Bettencourt has already sent a letter to Attorney General Ken Paxton asking him to weigh in on whether the county had the authority to do this at all. Paxton has not responded publicly.

I covered the Hill County pushback five weeks ago as a community-pressure story. That framing is now obsolete. Once a developer puts $80 million of dirt and a 1,235 MW load number into a federal complaint, you are not in NIMBY-meeting territory anymore. You are in precedent territory. Every developer with a county-jurisdiction site in Texas is going to read this docket. So is every county commissioner who was thinking about copying the Hill template.

The relevant question for the rest of us is what happens to the Provident Data Centers site in Hillsboro, the 300-acre project whose announcement triggered the moratorium in the first place. The City of Hillsboro is still working on a 1,000-foot residential buffer rule. Hill County is now defending its moratorium with public funds. The Aquila land is still under contract. Watch the docket.

Batch Zero: 64 Days to ERCOT's Queue Reset

While Hill County argues about whether 1,235 MW can be built at all, ERCOT is about to start telling 238,000 MW of queue submissions which of them get a study slot. The mechanism is PGRR145 and NPRR1325, the Large Load Interconnection Study rule that came out of SB 6. The dates are now load-bearing.

The ERCOT Board of Directors is scheduled to take a final vote on June 1. If it passes, the protocol goes effective August 1. Between those dates, the calendar runs on rails: July 10 is the last day for Large Load Interconnection Study approvals under the legacy process, July 24 is the Batch Zero submission cutoff, and August 7 is when ERCOT classifies each Batch Zero project as either fast-tracked, deferred, or sent back to the line. Developers who do not file by July 24 will not get a 2026 slot.

The May 21 Large Load Working Group meeting was the dress rehearsal. ERCOT's own April Board update says only 9,062 MW of large load has actually been approved to energize in the past twelve months, against the 238 GW queue and a non-simultaneous peak large-load consumption observation of roughly 3,900 MW. So roughly 4 percent of the queue gets a green light, 2 percent shows up on the meter, and the rest is paperwork that Batch Zero is about to triage.

This is the policy lever everyone in the industry has been asking for since SB 6 passed. It is also a real-money event for developers who have been free-rolling submissions to hold position. After July 24, the option premium on a speculative queue spot goes to zero.

$450 Million for Red Egret. 600 MWh on the Ship Channel.

Spearmint Energy closed roughly $450 million in financing this week on Red Egret, a 300 MW / 600 MWh standalone battery project in Texas City targeted for 2027 commercial operation. The capital stack tells you exactly what BESS finance looks like in 2026: a $225 million construction facility led jointly by First Citizens Bank and Investec, a $96 million preferred-equity investment from Nuveen's energy infrastructure credit platform, and roughly $126 million expected via Inflation Reduction Act ITC transfer.

I talked about Spearmint two weeks ago when its 400 MWh Del Rio and Laredo project hit commercial operation. Red Egret is a different geography and a much larger system. Texas City is in the Coast load zone, on the Houston ship channel, next to a petrochemical corridor that runs negative power-price hours regularly and gets caught short on hot August afternoons. That is a different congestion profile than the West Texas batteries paired with solar that dominate the early-2025 vintage, and it is the direction the next phase of ERCOT storage build is going.

The structure is the story. Merchant BESS revenues have compressed sharply from the 2023 numbers, and vanilla project finance has gotten tighter. The way you close a 600 MWh project now is to layer preferred equity on top of a construction loan and monetize the ITC up front. That is the template every Texas storage developer is going to be running for the next eighteen months.

Gas Crowds Out Wind in the Queue, and the Turbines Are Sold Out Through 2029

Two adjacent data points reframed Texas generation this week. First, natural gas in the ERCOT interconnection queue has climbed from 12,500 MW in March 2023 to roughly 64,000 MW, a fivefold increase, and now exceeds wind in queue megawatts for the first time in six years. Roughly 40 GW of that is directly tied to specific data-center load. The TCEQ is sitting on Pacifico Energy's GW Ranch air permit in Pecos County, a 7.65 GW behind-the-meter gas plant that would be the largest single such permit in the United States, with annualized CO2 equivalent at up to 33 million tons.

Second, GE Vernova reported $2.4 billion in data-center-tied electrification orders in Q1 2026, more than the entire 2025 calendar year. Combined gas-turbine backlog plus slot reservations is on pace for 110 GW by year-end 2026. Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are similarly oversold. There are not enough turbine slots through 2029 to build the 64 GW Texas gas queue and the rest of the global gas backlog at the same time.

One of these numbers has to give. The way it gives is going to be schedule slippage on the back end of the data-center buildout, which is going to push more 2026 power demand into the Batch Zero triage from the previous section. The OEM queue is the actual bottleneck. The interconnection queue is just where the OEM queue gets repriced.

Fermi America Buys 600 MW of Siemens SGT800s Off the Shelf

If you cannot wait in line for the turbines, you buy a set that someone else already ordered. Fermi America announced this week it has acquired more than 600 MW of combined-cycle gas-turbine equipment for Project Matador, the 5,769-acre HyperGrid campus outside Amarillo. The package is six Siemens SGT800 gas turbines, six heat-recovery steam generators, and one SST600 steam turbine — a fully aggregated combined-cycle set, named by model number.

Fermi already has preliminary state approval for the first 6 GW of gas at Matador. The May acquisition pulls forward the 1 GW of behind-the-meter power Fermi wants on-site by the end of 2026 to feed the first three 500,000-square-foot data center buildings. There is also a Siemens Energy LOI for an additional 1.1 GW behind it, and an NRC pre-application review running in parallel for up to four 1 GW reactors, with nuclear construction targeted for 2027.

The interesting part is not the size of the campus. The interesting part is the asset arbitrage. With turbine OEM lead times running to 2029 and beyond, secondary-market acquisition of in-hand equipment is now a strategic capability, not a procurement footnote. Expect to see more of it. Expect to see it priced at a premium over OEM list. And expect the developers that can write a check at that premium to be the ones with anchor-tenant offtake — which is to say, not many of them.

What to Watch Next Week

ERCOT Board of Directors, June 1. Final vote on PGRR145 and NPRR1325. If approved, the August 1 protocol effective date and the July 24 Batch Zero submission cutoff become binding. This is the single most important June 1 agenda item in the queue's history.

RCM Hill v. Hill County, U.S. District Court Western District of Texas. Watch for an emergency TRO or preliminary-injunction motion — the complaint asks for one — and for any response from AG Paxton to Senator Bettencourt's letter. The first written decision out of this docket sets the precedent.

ERCOT Final Summer SARA, June 1. The final Seasonal Assessment of Resource Adequacy for summer 2026 confirms or revises the 90.5–98 GW peak band ERCOT staff floated in April. With the queue closing on Batch Zero, the SARA number is what the legislature will use to justify or block whatever comes next.

PUCT large-load rulemaking under 16 TAC §25.194. Final adoption is tracked for July, but staff memos start dropping in early June. Anything that further constrains behind-the-meter co-location will land here first.

TCEQ air-permit dockets. Pacifico's GW Ranch permit is still open. Any next-tier behind-the-meter gas applications filed against the June 5 window are worth tracking — the 7.65 GW threshold is now the ceiling everyone is measuring themselves against.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

Four deals closed or got entitled in the past week and they read like the same memo. A $7.5 billion lease that won't tell you what state the building is in. A $225 million portfolio sale at $4.25 a watt that turns a telco's stranded colo into a billion-dollar AI platform. A North Carolina campus that lit its second 20 MW phase under a contract that pencils to roughly $2.16 million per megawatt per year. And an Arkansas county that banned data centers on a Tuesday and exempted the only one with a signed utility contract on the same Tuesday.

The common thread isn't geography. It's the tenant. Spec development as a business model is over. Capital prices off the name on the lease — and where a name exists, even an undisclosed one, the building gets financed, the campus gets exempted, the platform gets capitalized. Where it doesn't, the moratorium passes.

"Northern State, Investment Grade, 300 MW." Applied Digital Crosses 1 GW Without Naming the Town.

Applied Digital announced a fourth campus lease on Tuesday — Polaris Forge 3, 300 MW critical IT load, $7.5 billion in base contracted revenue over 15 years, up to $18.2 billion if options run — and the entire site disclosure in the 8-K is "a northern state." Not the county. Not the substation. Not even the state. APLD has confirmed Polaris Forge 1 is in Ellendale, ND and Polaris Forge 2 in Harwood, ND, but PF3 is being held back, presumably at the tenant's insistence, until shovels are in.

The tenant is the same "U.S.-based, high investment-grade hyperscaler" that signed Delta Forge 1 in April. APLD is now sitting on more than 1 GW of contracted capacity from a single counterparty across four campuses. The take-or-pay structure is consistent with prior Polaris leases — fixed monthly minimums against capacity reservations, NNN, escalators in the 2.5–3.0% range. The interesting fact isn't the dollar value. It's that the deal closes before the location is public. When the tenant's credit underwrites the entire stack, geography is a footnote.

Deal specs. Sponsor / tenant: Applied Digital (NASDAQ: APLD) / undisclosed U.S.-based investment-grade hyperscaler · Site: "Northern state," 600+ acres — town n/d · Footprint: n/d (single-story AI-factory format consistent with PF1/PF2) · Load: 300 MW critical IT on ~430 MW gross utility · Power density: n/d · Lease: 15-yr take-or-pay, NNN, escalator n/d, high investment-grade tenant · Deal value: $7.5B base, up to $18.2B with options · Source: DCD.

$4.25 a Watt. I Squared Buys 53 MW From a Telco That Didn't Want It.

Cogent Communications filed an 8-K Tuesday disclosing the sale of ten colocation facilities — Phoenix, Anaheim, Burbank, Stockton, Atlanta, Chicago, Elkridge, Kansas City, Nashville, Houston — to I Squared Capital for $225 million cash. Total installed capacity across the portfolio is roughly 53 MW spread over about 259,000 square feet. The implied price works out to ~$4.25 million per megawatt. That is the kind of number you only see when the seller has stranded assets they inherited from a wireline bankruptcy and the buyer has a thesis.

The thesis is what makes this trade interesting. I Squared isn't just buying ten facilities; the firm committed up to $1 billion in additional platform capital to build out the assets into AI-focused colocation. Most of these sites are urban edge or inner-ring metro — Burbank, Anaheim, Kansas City — where the building exists, the fiber exists, the substation feeds exist, and the only missing variable is rack density. Per-MW pricing is cheap precisely because nobody else will pay legacy telco overhead to renovate them. I Squared just bought a low-cost-basis ramp into edge inference, with a closing dependent on HSR clearance on or after June 12.

The power density is the giveaway on what these sites are today versus what they'll become. 53 MW across 259 ksf is roughly 205 W/sf — that's voice-switch density, not AI density. Anyone buying at this price is underwriting a tear-out, a re-feed, and a re-densification.

Deal specs. Sponsor / seller: I Squared Capital (new platform) / Cogent Communications (NASDAQ: CCOI) via Cogent Fiber LLC · Site: 10 facilities across Phoenix, Anaheim, Burbank, Stockton, Atlanta, Chicago, Elkridge, Kansas City, Nashville, Houston — urban-edge sites within or adjacent to each city's limits · Footprint: ~259 ksf total · Load: 53 MW installed (~205 W/sf blended, legacy telco density) · Lease: Asset purchase, customer contracts transfer; closing on/after June 12, 2026 post-HSR · Deal value: $225M cash plus up to $1B platform commitment · Source: Cogent 8-K.

$2.16 Million per MW per Year. Nscale Lights Phase Two in Madison, NC.

Phase 2 of the WhiteFiber-Nscale colocation deal at the NC-1 campus in Madison, North Carolina begins billing on May 30. That puts the full 40 MW under contract at the Rockingham County site, about 30 miles north of Greensboro. Total contract value is approximately $865 million over ten years, with contractual annual rate escalators undisclosed but baked in. Run the math: $865M / 40 MW / 10 yr = ~$2.16 million per MW per year.

That number is the spec. Anyone underwriting GPU-grade colocation against a non-investment-grade neocloud counterparty — and Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure private, is exactly that profile — wants a benchmark for what the credit premium looks like. Roughly $2.16M/MW/yr is what the market is asking. Compare to the Polaris Forge structure, where the tenant is investment-grade and the implied per-MW-per-year run-rate on the $7.5B base is closer to $1.67M — about 22% cheaper for the higher credit. The lease is modified gross with power as a pass-through, not NNN, which is the other tell: WhiteFiber is taking the asset-utilization risk, Nscale is paying for the GPUs and the electrons. There's an option to roughly double Nscale's deployment over two years, which is the real prize if Nscale's funding ramp holds.

Deal specs. Sponsor / tenant: WhiteFiber Inc. (Bit Digital subsidiary, NASDAQ: WYFI) / Nscale (private, UK) · Site: NC-1 campus, Madison, NC — Rockingham County, ~30 mi N of Greensboro · Footprint: n/d · Load: 40 MW (Phase 1 20 MW billing 4/30, Phase 2 20 MW billing 5/30) · Power density: n/d · Lease: 10-yr modified gross, power pass-through, annual escalators (rate n/d), private/non-IG credit · Deal value: ~$865M total contract value · Source: DCK.

Arkansas' Largest County Bans Data Centers. Then Exempts the $6 Billion One.

The Pulaski County Quorum Court did both things at once on Tuesday night. A one-year moratorium on new data-center permits passed 10-5. An exemption for AVAIO Digital Partners' 760-acre Leo campus, just outside Wrightsville and about twelve miles south of downtown Little Rock, passed 8-7. The county chose. The deal that already had a signed Entergy Arkansas contract for 150 MW — expandable to 1 GW — survived. Everything else stops for a year.

The structure is what makes this an Edge Cases story rather than a community-fight story. AVAIO is a private Connecticut-based developer running what looks like a hybrid build-to-suit / pre-lease campus model — the company describes the program as "$6 billion in combined investment from AVAIO and its customers", which is developer-speak for "tenants are funding the buildout against signed leases." Tenant names have not been disclosed. Entergy expects construction to start in June 2026.

The takeaway for anyone shopping county overlays in the Mid-South: a signed utility interconnection contract executed before the political winds shift is the most valuable piece of paper on the deal. It's grandfather rights in everything but name. Counties that pass moratoria carve out the projects that are already wired, because killing those projects also kills the rate-payer cost-share the project sponsors agreed to. The carve-out isn't favoritism — it's the developer's own contract structure protecting them.

Deal specs. Sponsor: AVAIO Digital Partners (private, Connecticut) · Site: 760 acres outside Wrightsville, AR — Pulaski County, ~12 mi S of downtown Little Rock · Footprint: Multi-phase campus, building program n/d · Load: 150 MW initial under Entergy Arkansas contract, expandable to 1 GW · Power density: n/d · Lease: Developer build with tenant fit-out; pre-leased structure implied by "$6B combined AVAIO + customer" language · Deal value: $6B program cost · Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

What to Watch Next Week

Columbus, GA — Project Ruby first reading. Atlas/Habitat's $5.18B / 865-acre hyperscale campus zoning overlay was paused 45 days past the May 19 council election. First reading now expected late May or early June. This is the next big Southeast site with an actual proposed lease tenant attached.

Box Elder County, UT — Stratos referendum certification. O'Leary Digital's 9 GW off-grid campus, approved May 4 with Ruby Pipeline gas, faces a referendum challenge. Governor Cox publicly told the developer the project would "never" be 100% gas. Watch for referendum certification and the gas-to-grid pivot that the political math is now forcing.

Reno City Council moratorium follow-up. The May 14 special meeting on a temporary data-center permitting pause has a follow-up vote pending. Vantage's Storey County phase-2 commentary is expected on the same calendar.

AEP Ohio commission update. AEP filed an update with the PUCO on data-center load under contract; the Q2 update lands soon. Watch the large-load tariff filings around the Columbus / New Albany cluster — that's where the AES Indiana / Google Monrovia tariff template gets stress-tested.

Cogent–I Squared HSR clock. Closing on or after June 12. If I Squared moves fast, expect the first follow-on acquisition for the platform to be telegraphed by Q3.

Disclaimer: Edge Cases is Barrio Energy's deal-flow product. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation to transact, or a substitute for your own diligence. Specs are sourced from public filings, press, and reporting; verify before you wire anything.

Two things happened in Texas energy this week that look like opposites and are, on closer inspection, the same story. At the top of the capital stack, NextEra agreed to swallow Dominion for roughly $67 billion — the largest utility acquisition in American history, structured end to end to chase the load that AI data centers are about to drop on the grid. At the bottom, the city council in El Paso voted to advance a proposal that would hand future data centers exactly zero tax breaks. Bigger and angrier, in the same seven days, pointed at the same thing.

The connective tissue is power: who builds it, who pays for it, and what it is actually made of. And on that last question the answer quietly shifted this week too — the EIA now expects solar to outproduce coal across ERCOT for the first full year in the grid's history. Scale is the strategy. Cost allocation is the battlefield. And the resource keeping the lights on is the one nobody is fighting about.

"The World's Largest Utility," Built for the AI Load

NextEra Energy agreed on May 18 to acquire Dominion Energy in an all-stock deal valued at nearly $67 billion, creating what both companies are calling the largest regulated utility in the world — roughly 10 million customers across the Southeast and a combined market capitalization near $249 billion. The merger agreement is dated May 15. Dominion holders get a 23% premium and 25.5% of the combined company; NextEra holders keep 74.5%. It is the biggest utility tie-up the country has seen and the largest energy-sector deal since Exxon bought Mobil in 1998.

The logic is not subtle. Dominion sits on top of Northern Virginia, the densest data center cluster on earth. NextEra brings Florida, the largest renewables fleet in the country, and a gas-hub buildout that includes a 5.2 GW project in Anderson County, Texas. Combined, the two would carry a roughly 130 GW large-load pipeline — a backlog of hyperscaler interconnection requests larger than the peak demand of most countries. The bet is that only a balance sheet this size can build generation fast enough to serve it.

I have spent the last two issues on the question of who pays for data center load. This is the supply-side answer to the same pressure: when you cannot build fast enough, you buy someone who already has. Expect NextEra's post-announcement stock dip and the antitrust clock to set the tone for the next few weeks, and expect at least one rival to start quietly shopping. The first AI-era utility mega-merger is rarely the last.

Solar Beats Coal in ERCOT, and No One Built a Plant to Stop It

The EIA's latest Short-Term Energy Outlook projects ERCOT solar generation at 78 billion kWh in 2026 against 60 billion kWh for coal — the first full year solar outproduces coal in the grid's history, per the agency's own data. Solar's share of the ERCOT mix has climbed from 4% in 2021 to 12% in 2025; coal has slid from 19% to 13%. About 40% of all U.S. solar capacity added this year, roughly 14 billion kWh worth, lands in Texas.

The detail that matters is the one in the generator inventory: there are no new coal plants planned in ERCOT, none. This is not solar winning an argument. It is solar winning by attrition while coal stops showing up. Solar already passed coal on a monthly basis back in March 2025; 2026 just turns it into an annual fact, every month except December.

Hold that against the load forecasts everyone keeps quoting. The queue headlines are gas and nuclear, because firm power is what hyperscalers say they want. But the electrons actually being added to the Texas grid right now are overwhelmingly solar — and, as the next story shows, the batteries that make solar dispatchable after the sun goes down.

El Paso Electric Wants a Data-Center Rate Class. The City Wants No Tax Breaks.

El Paso Electric is asking the PUCT to create a dedicated "High Load Factor Large Power" tariff — a rate class built specifically for data centers, with Meta's planned $10 billion El Paso campus as the anchor tenant. The filing includes a bridge period of one to five years during which Meta pays the full delivery cost of serving it; after that window, the cost of the generation built for the campus begins to shift onto the broader customer base.

Two days later, on May 21, the El Paso city council advanced a separate proposal: stricter oversight of AI data centers, mandatory water- and energy-use disclosure, and no tax abatements or incentives for new projects.

This is the cost-allocation fight I keep circling, except now it has a specific utility, a specific city, and a specific mechanism — that bridge period, after which the bill moves. The notable part is not that El Paso worries about cost-shifting. Everyone does. It is that a mid-size Texas city is moving to kill incentives at the exact moment NextEra is spending $67 billion on the premise that this load is the best customer the utility industry has ever had. Somebody is wrong about the economics. Probably both, in different places.

400 Megawatt-Hours in Del Rio and Laredo, and the 53% Nobody Mentions

Spearmint Energy brought two standalone ERCOT batteries to commercial operation this week: Tierra Seca near Del Rio and Seven Flags near Laredo, each 100 MW / 200 MWh, for a combined 200 MW / 400 MWh. Routine on its own. The context is not: Texas accounts for roughly 12.9 GW, or 53%, of the 24 GW of utility-scale battery storage the U.S. plans to add in 2026.

ERCOT entered the year with close to 13.9 GW of operational storage, nearly double the figure twelve months earlier. NERC's summer reliability assessment credits about 7.5 GW of new Texas batteries with firming the evening ramp as solar rolls off. That is the unglamorous machinery making the solar-over-coal headline real — and a big part of why ERCOT thinks it can clear a summer peak it now pegs in the 90-to-98 GW range, comfortably above the 85,508 MW record set in August 2023.

What to Watch Next Week

NextEra-Dominion's regulatory gauntlet. The Hart-Scott-Rodino antitrust clock starts now, and regulators in Virginia, the Carolinas, and Florida all get a say. Watch for analyst downgrades after NextEra's stock dip, and for a rival utility to start its own shopping.

The PUCT large-load rule. The final version of the interconnection rulemaking is due mid-year, including the $50,000-per-MW non-refundable fee. El Paso Electric's data-center tariff is the first real test case for how the cost actually gets split.

ERCOT's batch interconnection. The board is expected to approve the new batch process, targeting an August 1 effective date, with the PUCT weighing in during July. Any change reshapes a queue now sitting north of 450,000 MW.

The first heat. Peak season is here. The first sustained heat event will test whether the 90-plus GW forecast and the new battery fleet hold up. A fresh all-time record is well within reach.

El Paso's council vote. If the no-incentives proposal becomes policy, expect other Texas municipalities to reach for the same template.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

The three things people most commonly get wrong about data centers — that they raise residential electric rates, that they drain local water supplies, and that they get built next to schools — are all, on the actual numbers, the opposite of the truth. This is a short field guide for business leaders, civic officials, and anyone who's been asked to defend a project at a council meeting. Each section gives the technical case first, then the one-line version you can hand to a reporter or a neighbor.

The data behind these three points is not contested at the academic level. It is contested on cable news. That gap is the entire problem.

1. Do Data Centers Raise Electric Rates?

The technical case. A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory just published the most rigorous accounting of U.S. retail electricity prices to date in The Electricity Journal — Wiser, O'Shaughnessy, Barbose, Cappers, and Gorman (December 2025). The headline finding: on an inflation-adjusted basis, 32 of 50 states saw residential electricity prices fall between 2019 and 2024. The U.S. average rose about 0.5¢/kWh in real terms — roughly $54 per year for the average household. Commercial and industrial customers paid less in real terms in 2024 than in 2019.

More to the point: the states with the largest data-center load growth did not see the largest rate increases. They saw the smallest, and in several cases, the largest decreases. The Berkeley team documents this directly. North Dakota, which absorbed crypto, oilfield electrification, and data-center demand, saw real residential prices fall about 3¢/kWh over the study window. Iowa, with its hyperscale buildout, fell about 1¢. Virginia — home of Ashburn's "Data Center Alley" — was roughly flat to down. PG&E told California regulators that each new gigawatt of data-center load would lower residential bills by 1 to 2 percent for exactly the same reason.

The mechanism is utility economics 101. A utility's fixed costs — wires, substations, generation under power-purchase agreements, transmission infrastructure — don't shrink when demand falls. They're recovered through per-kWh rates. So if total demand on the system rises and the new demand pays for the marginal capacity it needs, the existing fixed-cost base gets spread over a larger denominator, and the per-kWh rate falls. This is the same principle that lets a restaurant lower per-plate cost by filling more tables: the rent doesn't change.

What actually drove rate increases? The Berkeley paper ranks five drivers. Data centers aren't on the list. Distribution capital expenditure — the wires and substations utilities have deferred since the 1990s — is #1, up about 50% nationally between 2019 and 2023. Climate and weather costs (California wildfires alone added $27 billion to ratepayer bills 2019–2023) are #2. Natural gas pass-throughs are #3. Renewable Portfolio Standards in states with shrinking load account for the rest, and only in a subset of states. The cable-news talking point that data centers and renewables are jacking up everyone's bills doesn't survive the regression.

The analogy for the public. When you spread the cost of a hotel across 200 occupied rooms instead of 100, the price per room goes down. Data centers fill the rooms. The reason your electric bill is rising isn't the new guest down the hall — it's the new roof on the building. And the storms that made the new roof necessary. And the gas that heats the lobby. The data center isn't the problem; it's the new guest paying their share of the existing fixed costs.

A second one-liner that works in a city council setting: "In every state that's grown data-center load fast, residential rates have fallen in real terms. The states with the worst rate problems — California, Connecticut, Hawaii — have almost no data centers. Don't confuse correlation with causation. The data tells the opposite story."

2. Do Data Centers Drain the Water Supply?

The technical case. Data-center cooling falls into two distinct technical buckets, and conflating them is the single most common error in public reporting. Evaporative cooling uses water as a thermal medium — water is evaporated, the phase change pulls heat out of the air, and the now-cooler air cools the servers. This is the high-water-use design. Closed-loop liquid or air cooling uses a sealed coolant circuit that never evaporates. Water is added once, at construction, the way a car's radiator is filled at the factory.

The industry's preferred metric is Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), measured in liters of water per kWh of IT load. The industry-average WUE for evaporative-cooled hyperscale is about 1.8 L/kWh. Microsoft's 2024 fleet average is 0.30 L/kWh; AWS reports 0.19 L/kWh; Google and Meta come in around 1.08–1.12 L/kWh. Microsoft's next-generation closed-loop design, announced December 2024, hits a WUE of essentially zero — the company says it eliminates 125 million liters (~33 million gallons) of annual water use per facility versus its prior design. Barrio Energy's data centers use the same closed-loop architecture.

The arithmetic for a 10 MW facility — Barrio's reference small-campus size — is straightforward. At industry-average WUE, a 10 MW evaporative facility consumes roughly 41.6 million gallons per year. At Microsoft's best-in-class WUE, the same load draws ~6.9 million gallons. A 10 MW closed-loop facility — Barrio's design, Microsoft's new design, the direction the whole industry is moving — uses approximately 20,000 gallons total, one time, at construction. That is roughly one residential swimming pool. The facility then runs for thirty years without refilling.

For perspective: the average U.S. 18-hole golf course consumes about 200 million gallons per year; a Southwest course in peak summer can hit 365 million. A single 100-acre Texas cotton field uses 32 to 65 million gallons per growing season. The average U.S. household uses about 110,000 gallons. A 10 MW closed-loop data center is closer, on annualized water use, to a single washing machine than it is to any of these. The "data centers are draining the aquifer" framing comes from extrapolating evaporative-design numbers — which are real, and which Microsoft, Meta, AWS, and Barrio have all moved away from — to a generation of facilities that no longer work that way.

The analogy for the public. A closed-loop data center uses water the way a car uses radiator coolant — you fill it once at the factory and it runs for the life of the vehicle. An evaporative data center uses water the way a swamp cooler does — it evaporates a continuous stream into the air. We build the first kind. The second kind exists, and the industry is rapidly retiring it.

The one-line version: "One 18-hole golf course in our region uses more water in a single year than ten of our data centers would use in their entire 30-year operating life. We're not the water problem. If anything, we're an argument against the water problem."

3. Where Do Data Centers Actually Get Built?

The technical case. Across every U.S. metro with a meaningful data-center footprint, the sites are sited in light industrial (M1) or equivalent zoning — the same category that hosts warehouses, distribution centers, light manufacturing, R&D labs, and self-storage. They are not, by ordinance or practice, sited in residential, mixed-use, or commercial-retail districts.

Ashburn, Virginia — the largest data-center cluster on the planet, with more than 100 facilities and roughly 70% of global internet traffic passing through it — permits data centers by right in three zoning categories: Industrial Park (PD-IP), General Industry (GI), and Mineral Resource–Heavy Industry. Data centers are not permitted in residential zones, period. Mesa, Arizona — the second-largest cluster in the Southwest — restricts them to General Industrial and High-Industrial zones only. The City of Chandler adopted a 2024–2025 ordinance codifying the same restriction.

The Texas pattern is identical. Plano's 46 MW Aligned DFW-01 facility at 2800 Summit Avenue sits inside the city's light-industrial corridor with a Specific Use Permit layered on top. Richardson's Digital Realty and CyrusOne campuses are in the I-M(1) Industrial / Telecom Corridor district. Crusoe's Stargate-affiliated 1,100-acre campus at 5502 Spinks Road in Abilene was annexed into city limits in 2021 specifically to access industrial zoning. IREN's 1,300-acre Sweetwater 1 campus sits on rural industrial land. Microsoft's San Antonio cluster spans Texas Research Park in Bexar County and ~1,100 acres of rural industrial land in Medina County.

An important framing point: a modern data center is, by industrial-zoning standards, an unusually quiet, low-traffic, fume-free neighbor. The typical M1 facility nearby is a Class A warehouse that runs 50 truck deliveries a day, an auto body shop with paint VOCs, a self-storage complex with 24/7 vehicle traffic, or a light-manufacturing plant with shift changes. A data center has ~10 truck deliveries a month, a parking lot for a small tech staff, and rooftop cooling equipment regulated by the same noise ordinance as every other M1 use. The argument is not that data centers should be welcomed because they're industrial; it's that they are better neighbors than most of what already lives in industrial.

The cases where data centers generate real public controversy almost all share a structural feature: they are proposed for land that has no zoning at all. The Texas Tribune-covered Hill County moratorium earlier this month is the canonical example — the project was on unincorporated land outside any city's zoning authority, where Texas counties don't have general zoning power to channel industrial development. That isn't a data-center problem. That's a zoning-gap problem. In every city with a functioning M1 district, this conflict simply doesn't happen, because the rule is already in place: industrial uses go in industrial zones. Data centers are the most boring kind of industrial use.

The analogy for the public. Data centers go where Amazon warehouses go, where FedEx hubs go, where the cabinet shop and the steel fabricator go. We don't get built across the street from elementary schools, and the zoning code wouldn't let us if we tried. The neighbor you have right now — the one with the loading docks, the diesel forklifts, and the third shift — is louder, smellier, and more truck-heavy than a data center will ever be.

The one-line version: "Show me a data center in a residential neighborhood. You can't, because zoning law doesn't allow it. We go where warehouses go — and unlike warehouses, we don't have eighteen-wheelers on the dock at 4 a.m."

The Bigger Picture

The pro-data-center case isn't ideological. It's arithmetic. Texas now leads the country with 142 data centers under construction, narrowly ahead of Virginia. The industry produced about 61,000 direct Texas jobs in 2023 and generated $3.2 billion in state and local tax revenue in 2024 — outside the sales-tax-exempt portion. A single Hood County campus is projected to bring enough property-tax base to fund a new junior high school. These projects are not extracting from communities; they are paying for the wires, the roads, the schools, and — when the rate design works correctly — for the marginal grid capacity they require.

The honest pro-data-center position is not that there are no costs. It's that the costs are recoverable, the benefits are durable, and the alternative — Texas conceding the AI infrastructure buildout to Virginia, Arizona, or any of the half-dozen other states writing checks for it — is not actually an alternative anyone in this state should want.

Use the charts. Quote the LBNL paper. The data is on our side; the conversation is the only thing that hasn't caught up.

What to Watch Next Week

PUCT draft rule §25.194 comments. The Senate Bill 6 rulemaking on large-load interconnection and transmission cost allocation is where the technical version of "data centers paying their fair share" gets written into Texas regulation. Hyperscaler and consumer-advocate filings are running now.

Hill County moratorium litigation. Texas counties don't have general zoning authority; legal experts expect a challenge to the May 12 moratorium on standing grounds. If overturned, the case becomes a precedent for keeping industrial projects on industrial land — by ordinance, not by ban.

EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook update. The May STEO will refresh the 2026 retail rate forecast for the South region. Watch for whether load-growth dilution starts showing up in Texas residential rate projections.

Microsoft Phoenix and Mt. Pleasant pilot data. Microsoft's first closed-loop facilities come online in late 2027. Early instrumentation data from the pilots — water draw, PUE, thermal performance — will be the first independent confirmation of the zero-evaporation design at hyperscale.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Barrio Energy develops behind-the-meter, closed-loop data center infrastructure in Texas. Nothing here is investment advice. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

A team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory published a paper in the December 2025 issue of The Electricity Journal called "Factors influencing recent trends in retail electricity prices in the United States." If that title sounds like the kind of thing only economists read, fair. But the findings are quietly explosive, and almost nobody on the cable-news side of the data-center debate has bothered to look at them.

The short version: across the country, real retail electricity prices barely moved from 2019 to 2024. Adjusted for inflation, the U.S. average declined roughly 8% from 2010 and has been flat since 2019. Thirty-two of fifty states saw inflation-adjusted residential prices decrease over the five-year study window. The headlines about prices "soaring" rely entirely on nominal dollars, and the authors say so explicitly. The story most retail customers tell themselves — that runaway data centers and renewables have set their bills on fire — is, at the national level, not the story the data tells.

And then there's Texas, where residential rates ran from 11.7¢/kWh in 2020 to 15.84¢/kWh in September 2025 — a 35% nominal increase, well ahead of inflation, with another ~29% projected rise by 2030. Texas is not the national story. Texas is the leading edge of where the national story is about to go.

The Study Nobody on Cable News Will Read

The Berkeley paper, authored by Ryan Wiser, Eric O'Shaughnessy, Galen Barbose, Peter Cappers, and Will Gorman, is the closest thing to a definitive accounting of what actually moved U.S. retail rates between 2019 and 2024. The full summary PDF runs roughly 80 pages of regression, state-by-state breakouts, and bill-impact decomposition. The headline finding is the one nobody wants to put on a chyron: residential prices rose about 0.5¢/kWh in real terms over those five years, or roughly $54 per year for the average 10,791-kWh household. Commercial and industrial customers? Their real prices fell by 0.3¢ and 0.2¢/kWh respectively.

That gap matters. Residential customers are quietly subsidizing C&I, and the gap has widened every year since 2019. The political conversation about who's "paying" for the data-center buildout is missing the part where, in many states, large industrial and commercial users have already been paying less on a real, per-kWh basis than they did five years ago. The question isn't whether residential customers are bearing more cost — they are. The question is which costs, and why.

The Berkeley team ran the decomposition and ranked the drivers. The ranking is going to make a lot of people on both sides of the renewables debate uncomfortable, so let's just walk it.

Five Drivers, Ranked

Driver #1: Distribution capital expenditure. The single largest factor in residential price increases. Utility distribution-related capex rose roughly 50% nationally between 2019 and 2023, far outpacing inflation. Aging-infrastructure replacement accounts for about 28% of that spend. This isn't transmission, and it isn't generation. It's the wires running down your street, the substations on the edge of your neighborhood, and the long tail of poles and transformers that utilities have been pushing off since the 1990s. The bill is now due.

Driver #2: Climate and weather. California's wildfire mitigation alone added roughly $27 billion to utility rates between 2019 and 2023, with about 40% of that being insurance cost growth. Storm hardening in Florida and the Gulf Coast — including, as we'll get to, the CenterPoint Houston securitization after Hurricane Beryl — is the second-largest geographic driver of residential bill increases. This bucket grows for a while no matter what anyone does about policy. The damage is already in the asset base.

Driver #3: Fuel volatility. Real residential prices rose fastest in states that lean heaviest on natural gas. Most utilities pass 100% of fuel costs through to customers via fuel adjustment clauses, so when gas spikes, residential bills move within months. EIA reported October 2025 gas prices were up 45% year over year and the agency expects another ~16% increase by October 2026. If you live in a gas-heavy ISO — like, say, ERCOT — fuel pass-through is doing more to your bill than anything else short-term.

Driver #4: RPS-linked renewables in shrinking-load states. The one place the study lands a finger on clean-energy mandates. In states with both a binding renewable portfolio standard and flat or declining load, RPS compliance added about 0.25¢/kWh on average. That's a small number, and it's contained to a specific subset of states. The vast majority — roughly three quarters — of new wind and solar built between 2019 and 2024 was market-driven, not RPS-driven, and the paper finds that market-driven renewables build had no discernible impact on retail prices. In several models, it pushed prices down. The cable-news talking point that "renewables raised your bill" is, on the numbers, mostly wrong.

Driver #5: Load growth direction. This is the one almost nobody talks about, and it's the one Texas should care about most. States where load grew, real residential prices fell. North Dakota — which absorbed crypto, oilfield electrification, and data center demand — saw real residential prices drop about 3¢/kWh because fixed costs were spread over more megawatt-hours. PG&E told regulators that each new gigawatt of California data-center load could lower residential bills by 1–2%, for the same reason. The intuition is straightforward: a utility's fixed cost base doesn't shrink, so more demand means lower per-kWh cost recovery. The question is whether the new load brings new capital cost with it, and at what ratio.

If the new load comes with $40 billion in transmission and $15 billion in generation built almost entirely to serve it, and if the rate design lets the new load avoid paying its share of those investments, then load growth isn't a deflator anymore. It's an accelerant. Welcome to Texas.

The Texas Carve-Out — Where the National Story Stops

Texas doesn't fit the national average on any of the five drivers cleanly. It's worse than average on three of them and structurally different on the other two.

Distribution capex: Oncor announced its 2026–2030 base capital plan at $47.5 billion in February 2026, up sharply from the prior plan. CenterPoint Houston's storm-hardening + resiliency request was $5.75 billion; PUCT approved $2.9 billion of it in November 2025. Layered on top, CenterPoint received $1.2 billion in securitization for Hurricane Beryl restoration in October 2025, with an immediate ~$2/month residential bill impact. Oncor's June 2025 base rate case was settled by the Commission in April 2026 at $560 million in annual increases on a 9.75% authorized return on equity.

That is roughly $52 billion of utility capex pre-approval or under construction in two service territories, on a horizon of five to seven years. Most of it lands on residential and small-commercial customers under current rate design.

Weather: Beryl alone produced enough storm damage to qualify CenterPoint for a one-billion-dollar securitization. The Berkeley paper's "climate and weather" bucket captures California fires and Florida hurricanes; Texas is now firmly in the same cohort.

Fuel: ERCOT's marginal price-setter is almost always natural gas, and Texas residential REPs (TXU, Reliant, Gexa, Cirro, and the long tail) pass fuel costs through with limited regulatory friction. ERCOT North average wholesale prices were around $27–34/MWh in 2025, but EIA's December outlook projected a 45% wholesale price spike between 2025 and 2026, and a high-demand scenario where data center load pushes ERCOT North wholesale prices 79% above baseline by 2027. That spike flows directly into the variable component of residential REP plans the next time those customers shop.

Renewables: Texas has no binding RPS. The 1999 RPS goal was met in 2009 and isn't binding on anything. So the one factor the Berkeley paper isolates as a real (if small) price driver is essentially absent here. Whatever is moving Texas residential bills, it isn't a clean-energy mandate.

Load growth: This is the structural divergence. ERCOT load grew about 5% from 2024 to 2025 and is forecast to grow roughly 10% per year through 2027, with data centers accounting for about 73% of large-load interconnection requests. Under the Berkeley model's logic, this should push real residential rates down — fixed costs spread over more megawatt-hours. Texas residential rates have done the opposite. The question is why, and the answer lives in the rate design.

Who's Subsidizing Whom: 4CP, SB 6, and the March 2026 Rule

Texas allocates wholesale transmission costs using a method called 4CP — the four coincident peaks. A large industrial or data-center customer's annual share of ERCOT transmission costs is based on its average demand during the four 15-minute intervals of highest system load each summer. If you can predict those intervals and curtail through them, your transmission allocation drops dramatically. Residential customers cannot curtail their air conditioning at 5:00 p.m. on a 105-degree day in August. Industrial customers can, and do.

The result, documented in detail in NRG's February 2025 PUCT remarks, is that residential and small-commercial customers in ERCOT pay a larger share of transmission costs than their share of energy consumption would suggest. The 4CP method, designed when the grid had a handful of large industrial sites and predictable peaks, has become a structural subsidy from households to large flexible loads in an era of 75-megawatt-and-up data center interconnections.

The legislature noticed. Governor Abbott signed Senate Bill 6 in June 2025, requiring PUCT to evaluate the 4CP method and finalize rule changes by December 31, 2026. SB 6 also sets new interconnection standards for loads of 75 MW and above, gives the Commission new authority over backup generation registration, and ties large-load curtailment obligations into ERCOT's reliability framework. PUCT published draft rule §25.194 on March 12, 2026; comments are running now.

The cost-allocation language is where the residential-versus-data-center fight gets decided. If PUCT replaces 4CP with a 12CP, a demand-ratchet, or a causation-based method, hundreds of millions of dollars of annual transmission cost recovery shift between customer classes. If PUCT leaves 4CP largely intact and only tightens the curtailment definitions, the residential subsidy of large loads continues — through the entire $33 billion Strategic Transmission Expansion Plan, of which the first $9.4 billion 765-kV phase was approved by the ERCOT Board in December 2025.

That's the real fight. Not whether data centers come to Texas — they're here, and the queue is full. The fight is over who pays the wire bill.

The 2026–2030 Capex Cliff

The Berkeley study is retrospective. The data window closes in 2024. None of the numbers above — Oncor's $47.5 billion, CenterPoint's $2.9 billion resiliency plan, the ERCOT STEP $33 billion, the Beryl securitization, the SB 6 rulemaking — show up in the regressions. The paper measures a national real-rate baseline that was, by its own findings, mostly flat. Texas is about to spend the next five years showing what happens when distribution capex doubles, transmission capex enters $30-billion-plus territory, and load growth runs at 10% a year through it all.

The math runs both ways. If 4CP gets replaced with a method that puts the new transmission costs on the loads driving them, then the load-growth dilution effect the Berkeley team found in North Dakota kicks in and Texas residential rates flatten — maybe even decline in real terms. If 4CP survives mostly intact, the capex cliff lands on residential customers and the 29%-by-2030 projection from the Texas Chemistry Council brief starts looking conservative.

The Berkeley paper does not predict either outcome. It just lays out what made rates do what they did over the past five years, and it provides the framework for thinking about which dial moves next. The frameworks are useful. The conclusions are honest. The part most retail customers will care about — what their bill looks like in 2028 — depends entirely on a PUCT rulemaking that closes 19 months from now.

Read the paper. Or at least read the summary. It's free.

What to Watch Next Week

PUCT draft rule §25.194 comments. The comment period on the SB 6 large-load interconnection and cost-allocation rule is the single most consequential proceeding for Texas residential rates over the next five years. Final rule must be in place by December 31, 2026. Watch for big-load coalition filings (data center hyperscalers, crypto miners, refiners) versus consumer-advocate filings (Office of Public Utility Counsel, Texas Coalition for Affordable Power).

EIA Short-Term Energy Outlook update. STEO refreshes monthly and is currently projecting another roughly 5% nominal residential price increase in the South region for 2026 on top of 2025. The May 2026 STEO will likely raise that figure as Q1 utility rate-case settlements get baked in.

PUCT 4CP methodology decision. Separate from the §25.194 rulemaking, PUCT was required under SB 6 to evaluate 4CP within 90 days of the bill's effective date. The Commission has been working through the evaluation; a decision memo or open-meeting item naming a successor methodology — or formally extending 4CP — is overdue.

CenterPoint and AEP Texas next rate filings. Both are expected to follow Oncor's playbook with comprehensive base rate cases in 2026, citing storm hardening, load growth, and the same distribution-capex driver the Berkeley paper ranked first.

The LBNL 2026 edition. The Berkeley team typically refreshes the dataset annually. The March 2026 update already pulls in Q3 2025 EIA-861 data. Texas-specific tabs in the next version, expected this fall, will be the first time the academic literature catches up with what's happening on the ground here.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

For three years the Texas data center story has been a one-way ratchet: more megawatts requested, more campuses announced, more capital committed, and a grid operator that kept raising its own forecast. This week the ratchet caught. On May 12, Hill County commissioners voted 3-2 to freeze new data center construction in unincorporated areas for a year — the first Texas county to do it. Two days later came a report that a Chevron subsidiary wants a West Texas school district to hand it a nine-figure tax break for a gas plant built to power a single data center. The Senate Finance chair is calling the state's data center tax exemptions "unsustainable." None of this stopped the capital — Nvidia put $5.5 billion into a Texas miner the same week — but the friction is now real, organized, and on the record.

The through-line: there is a widening gap between what data center developers are promising and what counties, regulators, and the grid will actually absorb. ERCOT itself has said as much. The deals below are this week's evidence on both sides of that gap.

"We Don't Want It in Our Community": Hill County Freezes the Land Rush

On Tuesday, Hill County commissioners voted 3-2 to impose a one-year moratorium on new data center construction in unincorporated parts of the county — the first Texas county to pull that lever. The trigger was a proposed 300-acre campus in north Hillsboro tied to Dallas-based Provident Data Centers, which already runs nine US facilities, four of them in Texas. More than 100 residents packed the commissioners' meeting to object over water draw, noise, and grid strain.

County Judge Justin Brassell was blunt about what comes next: he expects lawsuits from developers "and perhaps the state as well," and framed the pause as a guardrail on a "land rush." He is probably right about the state. Houston Senator Paul Bettencourt, who passed a 2025 bill restricting municipal moratoriums, has already asked Attorney General Ken Paxton to investigate counties that pass pauses. The same week, nearby Hood County weighed its own moratorium and rejected it. So the score is one county in, one county out, and an AG referral pending — which is to say the legal template for every rural Texas county gets written in the next few months.

The part worth sitting with: this is not NIMBY noise from a metro suburb. Hill County is rural, the kind of place the buildout was supposed to be welcome. When the friction shows up there, the friction is structural.

Chevron Wants West Texas Schoolkids to Subsidize a Data Center's Power Plant

A May 14 report laid out the filing: a Chevron subsidiary, Energy Forge One, has applied for a Texas school-district tax abatement worth potentially $227 million-plus over ten years for a gas-fired plant in West Texas built to serve a single data center. The likely tenant is Microsoft, though Chevron says no final agreement exists and insists the incentive covers only the power facility, not the data center itself. That distinction is doing a lot of work.

What makes this one notable is the precedent. The State Comptroller's office issued a recommendation supporting the application in late January — the first time the program has backed an abatement for a plant built solely to power a data center. School-district tax breaks were designed to land manufacturing plants and the payrolls that come with them. A behind-the-fence gas turbine serving one hyperscaler is a different animal, and the Comptroller just blessed it.

It arrives at an awkward moment. Senate Finance Chair Joan Huffman has called the state's roughly $1.3 billion a year in data center sales-tax breaks "extremely concerning" and "unsustainable," with an interim hearing set for July ahead of possible repeal legislation. Texas spent a decade competing to give this industry money. The argument now is whether it can afford to keep doing it.

Nvidia Writes the Check: $5.5 Billion Into a Texas Miner

The capital, for its part, did not get the memo about friction. On May 7, Nvidia announced a two-part deal with IREN — the Bitcoin miner that has spent the past year recasting itself as an AI host — pairing a potential $2.1 billion equity investment with a $3.4 billion, five-year managed cloud contract for Nvidia's own internal AI workloads. Call it $5.5 billion. The hardware rolls out through 2026 at IREN's 750 MW campus in Childress, Texas, where the company is building liquid-cooled halls for a 200 MW critical IT load.

Read the structure, not the press release. Nvidia is moving downstream to lock up guaranteed compute capacity for itself, and it is using a former miner's Texas land and power position to do it. That is the miner-to-AI pivot graduating from "we signed a tenant" to "the chip vendor is now our anchor investor." Expect Hut 8, Bitfarms, and Cipher to chase the same template — I flagged Hut 8's $9.8 billion tenant comp two weeks ago, and this is the next rung up the ladder.

For a sense of how committed the sector is to leaving Bitcoin behind: MARA reported Q1 on May 11 with a $1.26 billion net loss, having sold 15,100 BTC for about $1.1 billion, and management stated flatly that it is "no longer a Bitcoin miner." When the companies say it themselves, believe them.

GE Vernova and Blue Energy Bet on "Gas-Plus-Nuclear" — One Site, Two Fuels, 2.5 GW

On May 5, GE Vernova and nuclear startup Blue Energy announced a 2.5 GW "gas-plus-nuclear" power station in Texas, designed to feed a data center campus from a single site. The plan pairs GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 small modular reactors with GE 7HA.02 gas turbines on a "gas-to-nuclear bridge": gas energizes first — roughly 1 GW by 2030 — then nuclear ramps to about 1.5 GW by 2032.

The partners hold a turbine slot reservation for two 7HA.02 units in 2029, target a final investment decision in 2027, plan early site works in Texas this year, and intend to file for an NRC construction permit in 2027, aiming for roughly 48 months to power through offsite prefabrication. Whether the nuclear half arrives on that schedule is the open question — SMR timelines have a habit of slipping right. But the gas half is real and near-term.

Notice what this shares with the Chevron plant: generation purpose-built beside the data center, not added to the shared ERCOT grid. Two announcements in one week of multi-hundred-megawatt plants whose entire reason for existing is one customer behind the fence. The grid is increasingly not the power source — it is the thing the power source sits next to.

175 MW Now, 2.1 GW Later: The Gap Between Promised and Real

If you want the whole tension in a single project, look at Lufkin. Developer Amp Z is building a campus on the former Southland Paper Mill site in Angelina County, East Texas — about 1,041 acres, with room to expand to 4,000. The capacity trajectory: 55 MW grid-connected today, 175 MW by the end of 2026, 1.1 GW by 2028, and a total of 2.1 GW with a gigawatt of on-site self-generation by 2029.

Every one of those numbers past the first is a promise. And ERCOT has been unusually candid that the promises do not all come true — the grid operator told the PUCT this spring it has "concerns with using the preliminary load forecast" precisely because so many large-load projects will not materialize on time, at full scale, or at all. CEO Pablo Vegas told the House State Affairs Committee in early May that ERCOT is tracking about 410,000 MW of interconnection requests, 87% of them data centers. Nobody — least of all ERCOT — thinks all of that gets built.

That is the gap the county commissioners and the Senate Finance chair are reacting to. Developers underwrite the 2.1 GW headline. Communities and regulators have started underwriting the 175 MW that is actually under construction. Both can be right, and the distance between them is where the next two years of Texas energy politics will be fought.

What to Watch Next Week

Paxton's response to Bettencourt. Whether the AG opens an investigation into Hill County — and any other county pause — sets the legal template for every rural Texas county now weighing a moratorium.

The ERCOT board vote on Batch Zero, June 1. The large-load interconnection framework cleared PRS and ROS earlier this month; the June 1 board vote and the targeted summer effective date are the next hard dates. No change since last issue — watch for one.

The Energy Forge One abatement decision. Whether the school district actually approves Chevron's tax break would cement the precedent of public subsidy for data-center-only power plants.

Huffman's Senate Finance interim hearing prep. The witness list and any draft repeal language for the data center sales-tax exemption should start surfacing ahead of the July hearing.

Copycat county moratoriums — and the lawsuits. Hood County said no, but other exurban counties are studying pauses, and Hill County is openly bracing for developer litigation. The first suit filed tells you how this fight gets resolved.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

Two stories landed on the same Wednesday this week and they deserve to be read together. Hut 8 announced a 15-year, $9.8 billion triple-net take-or-pay lease at its Nueces County campus — 352 MW of NVIDIA DSX-spec capacity to an unnamed "high-investment-grade hyperscaler." Hours later, the Texas Tribune confirmed that for the first time since January 2016, gas projects have passed wind in ERCOT's interconnection queue. About 64,000 MW of gas, 48,000 MW of wind, against a load forecast that says Texas needs roughly 360 GW of new everything by 2032.

These are the same story. The capital is showing up — first as 15-year lease commitments from credit-grade tenants, then as study deposits in the queue, then, eventually, as steel in the ground. What hasn't shown up yet is the steel. ERCOT cleared its first Texas Energy Fund gas plant onto the grid this week, two years and 460 MW into a $7.2 billion program. That is roughly 1.6 percent of the load growth ERCOT thinks it has to plan for.

Hut 8 Books a $9.8 Billion Tenant, and Sets the Comp

Hut 8 disclosed on May 6 that it had executed a 15-year, triple-net, take-or-pay lease for the first 352 MW of IT capacity at its Beacon Point campus in Nueces County. Base term contract value is $9.8 billion. Three five-year renewal options bring the disclosed all-in maximum to roughly $25.1 billion. The tenant is identified only as "high-investment-grade." Bloomberg confirmed neither side would name the counterparty. The stock popped about 30 percent on the news.

The site is permitted for 1 GW of utility capacity; first data hall delivery is Q3 2027. The build spec is NVIDIA DSX, the new hyperscaler reference design for liquid-cooled, 130–150 kW-per-rack AI training. That last detail is the one to underline. The lease contemplates training and inference, not hash power. Hut 8 is not selling power; it is selling fully built, NVIDIA-spec, ready-to-rack data hall.

Run the math on the disclosed base term. $9.8 billion divided by 352 MW divided by 15 years works out to roughly $1.86 million per MW per year of base rent, before the renewal escalators. Strip out the implied capex amortization and you still have a real-money number for the rest of the Texas miner land bank. Every Riot, MARA, Cipher, IREN, and Bitfarms site in West Texas is now being valued — by their boards and by their activist shareholders — against a $9.8 billion comp that just printed.

I covered the AMD–Riot–Rockdale pivot two weeks ago as the moment the miner-to-AI-landlord trade booked its first real quarter at 50 MW and $636 million. This is the same trade, an order of magnitude bigger, with three letters that matter most: NVIDIA DSX. The activists who told Riot to do this will tell every other miner to do this, and they will be pointing at $9.8 billion.

For the First Time in a Decade, the Texas Queue Wants Gas

The Texas Tribune and Houston Public Media reported on May 7 that gas-fired generation has now passed wind in ERCOT's interconnection queue for the first time since January 2016. Roughly 64,000 MW of gas against 48,000 MW of wind. Three years ago, gas in the queue was 12,500 MW. That is a roughly 410 percent increase in 36 months.

Two things to note. First, queue position is not steel. Developers post study deposits, get a slot, and a meaningful share of those projects never reach commercial operation — historical ERCOT attrition is north of 80 percent. Second, queue composition still tells you what people are willing to pay deposits on, and right now they are paying gas deposits even though Mitsubishi Power, Siemens Energy, and GE Vernova have sold their next available turbine slots into 2030. I flagged the GE Vernova 100 GW backlog three weeks ago. It has not gotten better.

About 9,000 MW of the queued gas is Texas Energy Fund-backed. The rest is unsubsidized speculation against the data-center number. The story isn't that wind is dying — wind in the queue grew 87 percent over the same window. The story is that the Texas grid mix everyone in this state has spent the last decade pricing in is no longer the marginal direction. Marginal new megawatts are now gas-plus-storage with a hyperscaler counterparty, and the developer pool sees that.

Pin Oak Creek Energizes: TEF's First Real Plant, 460 MW Behind a $7.2 Billion Promise

Calpine's Pin Oak Creek peaking facility began feeding the ERCOT North zone this week. 460 MW, Freestone County, $464 million project cost, with a $278 million Texas Energy Fund loan at 3 percent for 20 years. NRG's 456 MW Houston-region TEF unit is expected to follow "later this summer." Those two are the only TEF megawatts that will be on the grid by Labor Day.

The program-level math: about $2.65 billion committed and 3,564 MW awarded, against a $7.2 billion legislative authorization. Roughly 37 percent of the program is committed by dollars, and roughly 6 percent of awarded megawatts has actually energized.

Now the comparison the bond market should be making. ERCOT's preliminary load forecast — the same one I described two issues ago as filed-then-disavowed-by-its-own-staff — wants 290,000 MW of net new peak demand by 2032. The TEF program at full disbursement adds maybe 8,000 MW of dispatchable. That is not a financing problem. That is a turbine, transmission, and labor problem, and the program was always going to be a rounding error against the load number. The first 460 MW of it is on the grid now. Two years in.

Batch Zero Clears PRS and ROS — June 1 Board Vote, August 1 Effective

While the press releases were going out, the actual rulemaking that decides who gets to plug in to the Texas grid moved a step closer to law. ERCOT's Protocols Revision Subcommittee voted on May 6 and the Reliability and Operations Subcommittee voted on May 7 to send PGRR145 and NPRR1325 — the SB 6 implementation package — to the Technical Advisory Committee. ERCOT's chair has set June 1 as the Board deadline; the target effective date is August 1, 2026.

The mechanics, briefly. The protocol creates "Batch 0" for large loads of ≥75 MW that have already executed an interconnection agreement, grandfathering them into the existing study process. Everyone else — including the long tail of speculative data-center load that drove the 367,790 MW forecast number — gets routed into a new annual batch process. Studies aggregate by transmission service provider region. The PUCT has signaled in commentary that it intends to use batch admission to police what counts as a "real" load, with EAR-style filing requirements following behind.

This is the rule that decides whether the queue numbers ERCOT keeps publishing actually translate into transmission planning. If the Batch 0 grandfathering is generous, the queue stays bloated. If it isn't, expect a ten-figure cull of phantom load projects in Q3. Watch the PUCT companion rulemaking on 16 TAC §25.194 — comments closed April 17, and the order is expected before Batch 0's August 1 effective date.

TeraWulf Q1: Lease Revenue Crosses Hash Power for the First Time

TeraWulf reported its Q1 2026 results on May 8. Total revenue: $34.0 million. HPC hosting and lease income: $21.0 million — the first quarter in the company's history where lease revenue is the larger line. Cash and restricted cash: $3.1 billion. Net loss per share: $1.01, mostly depreciation. The company also closed a $250 million revolver in the period.

For Texas readers, two disclosures matter. First, a new 480 MW site acquisition at Hawesville, Kentucky, with hyperscaler interest. Second, more relevant: the Abernathy, Texas joint venture is now slotted at 168 MW under a 25-year lease, with Q4 2026 first energization. That is a 25-year contracted Texas counterparty number from a miner whose stock used to move with the BTC chart.

The pattern from the last three weeks is consistent enough to call. AMD-Riot-Rockdale, 50 MW, $636 million. Hut 8-Beacon Point, 352 MW, $9.8 billion. TeraWulf-Abernathy, 168 MW, 25 years. Different miners, different scales, same trade. The miner-to-landlord pivot is no longer a thesis. It is the Q1 print.

What to Watch Next Week

CleanSpark fiscal Q2 2026 earnings, May 11. Texas and Wyoming AI-site disclosures are expected; the specific question is whether CleanSpark's Vegas/Las Cruces megasite gets a counterparty letter before the call.

MARA Holdings Q1 2026 print midweek. Granbury and Kaufman site updates are the read. Any Exaion-linked deployment in Texas would be material.

ERCOT TAC vote on PGRR145/NPRR1325 the week of May 12. This is the gate before the June 1 Board vote. If TAC sends back amendments, the August 1 effective date slips, and the queue stays the queue.

Waha basis. The June prompt closed at -$5.69/MMBtu on May 1. Watch the negative-print streak count and the in-service date for Kinder Morgan's GCX expansion. Negative basis with a hyperscaler counterparty buying the molecule on the long-haul is the trade somebody is going to do explicitly soon.

Stargate Freebird in Milam County. The TDLR filing for the $470 million first phase has an October 15 completion target. Any amendment to that filing or any sign of substation work in OASIS is news.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

Riot Platforms reported Q1 2026 earnings on April 30, and for the first time the data center hosting line — $33.2 million — was a real entry on the income statement instead of a footnote about future opportunity. Two days earlier, AMD exercised the option to take its contracted capacity at Rockdale from 25 MW to 50 MW, lifting the combined deal to roughly $636 million over ten years. The same week, a new gas-power developer called ElectriGen announced 1.8 GW of behind-the-meter generation for an undisclosed Texas data center, and the Texas Tribune ran a feature on home builders who are now two months late on every house they pour because the electricians have all gone to Abilene.

Three deals and a feature story, and the same theme underneath: in 2026, Texas AI infrastructure is not being added to the grid. It is being built next to the grid, and the workforce that used to wire houses is being conscripted to wire the new one.

AMD Pulls the Trigger on Rockdale: 50 MW, $636 Million, and the Miner Pivot Books Its First Real Quarter

Riot's Q1 print was, on its face, a beat: $167.2 million in revenue against a roughly $130 million consensus, with $111.9 million from Bitcoin mining and $33.2 million from the new data center hosting business. The interesting math is on the cost line. Riot reported a Q1 cash mining cost of $44,629 per coin and a fully-loaded all-in cost of $96,283 per coin against a quarter-average BTC price hovering near that fully-loaded number. On a maintenance basis, mining is barely profitable. On a fully-loaded basis, it is not.

So the company finally ran out of reasons to keep the second half of Rockdale on the BTC side of the ledger. AMD's option exercise doubles its contracted footprint to 50 MW and pulls forward the phasing: 5 MW already energized, another 20 MW in May, a third 10 MW phase in November, and the final 15 MW in May 2027. By then Riot expects an annualized data center run rate of $55.6 million off a single tenant on a single campus — roughly half of what its entire Bitcoin mining segment generated in Q1.

The narrative reading is that AMD wanted more GPUs. The infrastructure reading is that there is nowhere else in Texas to put 25 MW of GPU capacity in 2026 that an investment-grade tenant can actually move into this year. I flagged the transformer queue last week; this is the demand side of the same equation. When Wärtsilä's reciprocating engines have a 2027 ship date and GE Vernova's gas turbines slot into 2030, the only available power in the near term is a campus that has already been built — even if that campus was originally designed to mine Bitcoin.

ElectriGen Goes Off-Grid: 1.8 GW Behind the Meter, No ERCOT Study, No Named Tenant

A new gas-power developer surfaced on April 27 with an announcement that should have read like a press release and instead reads like a thesis statement. ElectriGen unveiled a 1.8 GW behind-the-meter natural gas platform in Texas — two 900 MW plants at 34.5 kV with battery storage layered in, sized to deliver about 1.5 GW of net IT load after parasitics. Commercial operations target 2028. The contract structure is 15 years plus 5-year extension options. The counterparty is described only as a data center developer. The site location is undisclosed. The tenant is not named.

That last set of details is the news. Behind-the-meter generation has been the Texas AI workaround since at least Crusoe's Abilene campus and Wärtsilä's recent 790 MW order — but both of those were anchored to specific tenants and specific sites. ElectriGen is the speculative version. A power developer raises capital, signs a non-binding LOI for 20 years of contracted capacity, breaks ground, and trusts that whichever hyperscaler arrives first with a checkbook will be glad it did. The campus is being financed like a regulated utility against a tenant that has not yet, in any public filing, committed to taking the power.

Mechanically, ElectriGen also threads every Texas regulatory needle simultaneously. No SB 6 large-load study. No PUCT 25.194 site-control collateral. No interconnection queue position. No ERCOT load forecast filing. The plant is a customer of a gas utility, not the wholesale electricity market — which means it does not appear on any of the dashboards regulators are now staring at. Whatever the 410 GW number is or is not, ElectriGen's 1.5 GW will not be in it.

Two Months Late on Every House

The bottleneck this week is not transformers. It is the people who would install them. The Texas Tribune spoke to home builders who say the construction schedule on a typical Texas single-family build is now two months longer than it was before the data center boom — not because lumber is slow or permits are slow, but because the electricians are gone. Texas employs roughly 71,000 licensed electricians. Crusoe's DC1 in Abilene is paying about double the residential subcontractor rate. The math from there is not complicated.

Builder Gene Lantrip put it on the record: every house his crews finish is two months later than it would have been in 2023. The state has responded by streamlining license reciprocity with Iowa, Alabama, and Arkansas, effective since November, so that out-of-state journeymen can clear the Texas inspection regime faster. The pipeline math still does not work. An apprenticeship cycle is multiple years; the AI buildout cycle is monthly.

This is where the political economy gets interesting. The transformer queue is an industrial story that mostly affects developers and ratepayers. The labor crunch is a story that shows up in mortgage closings, in school district enrollment forecasts, and in the kind of constituent calls that get a state senator's attention. The next round of Texas data center legislation — whatever the next SB 6 is — will be a labor bill as much as a grid bill. Watch for it.

What to Watch Next Week

The PUCT 25.194 final rule. Comments closed April 17. Staff is expected to circulate a recommendation at the next open meeting. The 75 MW interconnection threshold and the per-megawatt collateral are the two numbers in play.

Microsoft–Chevron–Engine No. 1 definitive agreement. The exclusivity announcement on the West Texas 2.5 GW (potentially 5 GW) campus dropped April 1. FID is expected late Q2. If it lands as a definitive deal, the off-grid hyperscaler model has its first hyperscaler-of-record.

The rest of the miner Q1 prints. CleanSpark, Cipher, MARA, and Hut 8 all report through the next two weeks. Riot's data center revenue line is the new comp. Watch for additional AI hosting deals announced alongside earnings, and for BTC treasury liquidations financing the buildouts.

ERCOT's grid-forming retrofit incentive. The IBRWG concept presented in late March puts roughly $25 million on the table at $1,500/MW for legacy battery storage assets to retrofit grid-forming inverters. The protocol revision request is expected at the next ROS/TAC cycle.

Summer 2026 ERCOT SARA. The seasonal assessment will reset the conversation around real near-term tightness. The preliminary LTLF showed a 90.5–98 GW summer peak against the long-term 410 GW topline. The two numbers cannot both be right, and SARA is where the contradiction has to start resolving.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

ERCOT filed its preliminary long-term load forecast with the Public Utility Commission on April 15, and the number on the front page was 367,790 megawatts of peak demand by 2032. That is roughly 4.3 times the 85,508 MW all-time record set in August 2023, and it is the kind of figure that makes state senators want to hold a press conference.

Forty-eight hours later, at the April 17 PUCT open meeting, ERCOT's own staff told commissioners they had "concerns with using the preliminary load forecast values" for the 2026 Reliability Assessment, or any transmission planning, or any resource adequacy analysis. PowerHouse Texas called it a "high-end planning scenario." Translation: the grid operator filed the number, then distanced itself from the number, then asked the Commission not to rely on the number. Classic.

Meanwhile, the week's actual signed deals kept arriving. Wärtsilä sold 790 MW of off-grid gas engines to an unnamed Texas data center. DataBank closed a $2 billion construction loan for three hyperscale buildings south of Dallas. GE Vernova reported that its gas turbine backlog now exceeds 100 GW, with Q1 data center orders up triple-digits. And Base Power and a South Texas co-op scaled a 50 MW distributed battery fleet that bids directly into the ERCOT ancillary services market.

None of those deals cares whether ERCOT stands behind its own 368 GW number. They are being built to the assumption that the demand is already here.

"Texas Demand to Quadruple by 2032, ERCOT Says. Maybe."

The April 15 filing projects peak ERCOT demand climbing from today's record to about 278,000 MW by 2029 and 367,790 MW by 2032. Of that, roughly 228,420 MW is large data center load, aggregated from what the transmission and distribution service providers submitted to ERCOT based on what customers asked them for.

Set that against ERCOT's near-term summer 2026 outlook, which has peak demand in the 90,500 to 98,000 MW range, and the numbers don't meet in the middle. Even the 112 GW that you get by fully crediting every large-load submission for next year is well below what the 2032 forecast extrapolates from. I flagged ERCOT's 410,000 MW four-year scenario two weeks ago when it went to the Capitol; this is the same math problem wearing a different tie.

What makes this filing different is that ERCOT itself is openly skeptical. The Commission will use a separate, more conservative number for its 2026 planning work. The 368 GW headline gets to exist as a "what if everyone shows up" figure while the actual grid-planning exercises run on something closer to reality. That is a reasonable way to handle the uncertainty. It is also an admission that large-load interconnection requests, as currently submitted, are not a real demand signal.

Which brings us back to SB 6, PUCT rule 25.194, and the $50,000-per-megawatt non-refundable fee. The comment window on 25.194 closed the same day as the load forecast hearing. The rule is designed to filter the 368 GW down to whatever fraction is willing to write checks. ERCOT's caveat on its own forecast is, in effect, the sell-side argument for why the filter is needed.

Wärtsilä Sells 790 MW of Reciprocating Engines, Off-Grid

On April 23, Finnish engine-maker Wärtsilä announced it would supply a 790 MW off-grid gas plant for an under-construction Texas data center. The configuration: forty-two Wärtsilä 50SG reciprocating engines running on natural gas, delivering power behind the meter. Equipment ships in 2028, commercial operation in late 2029.

Wärtsilä called Texas "the next Data Center Alley" in the press release, which is the kind of thing you put in a press release. More interesting is what the tech choice implies. Reciprocating engines are not the default for a plant this size. Gas turbines are. The reason to pick forty-two recip engines over, say, four combined-cycle blocks is that you can actually get them in 2028. The turbine queue, as of this week, can't promise that.

The customer is not disclosed. Wärtsilä says this is its fifth U.S. data center order and first in Texas, bringing cumulative U.S. data center capacity sold to about 2.4 GW. Whoever the counterparty is, they've made the same structural bet that Microsoft and Chevron made in the Permian and that Crusoe made in Abilene: the grid is not going to be the bottleneck, because the grid is not going to be the power source.

DataBank Closes $2 Billion, and MUFG Is Back in the Story

On April 21, DataBank closed a $2.0 billion construction loan on the first three buildings of its Red Oak, Texas campus, 300 acres south of Dallas. DFW9, DFW10, and DFW11 total 600,000 square feet and 180 MW. All three are already fully pre-leased. The administrative agent is MUFG Bank.

DataBank says the facility pulls delivery timelines forward by about 18 months. The company has now closed roughly $4.7 billion in financings over the last twelve months, including a $1.6 billion credit facility expansion and a $1.1 billion hyperscale securitization. That is not a capital-constrained company.

Two things to flag. One, the North Texas build-out is absorbing capital at the same clip as the Permian and the Panhandle, and gets a fraction of the airtime. Two, MUFG showing up as lead on a $2 billion DFW construction facility is the same pattern I flagged in the NextEra East Texas Hub story from article-10: Japanese balance sheets are quietly financing a big slice of this build-out, and the mechanism is debt rather than equity. When Texas data centers get leveraged at 60 to 70 percent and the senior debt is underwritten in Tokyo, that is a supply chain worth paying attention to.

GE Vernova's Backlog Hit 100 GW. Next Slot: 2030.

GE Vernova reported Q1 2026 earnings on April 22. Revenue came in at $9.34 billion, EPS at $17.44, and total orders up 71 percent year over year to $18.3 billion. The number worth framing, though, is in the gas turbine business.

The combined backlog plus slot reservations for GE's heavy-duty gas turbines climbed from 83 GW to 100 GW in a single quarter, and management guided to at least 110 GW by year-end. The electrification segment booked $2.4 billion of data center equipment orders in Q1 alone, more than all of 2025 combined. Total company backlog is $163 billion. GE now expects to hit $200 billion in backlog by 2027, a year earlier than the previous guide.

I told you last month that nobody could build a turbine. Here is the vendor's own math: the 7HA, 9HA, and F-class slots through roughly 2029 are effectively spoken for, and new customers are being quoted delivery in 2030 and beyond. Texas is disproportionately represented in the order book. The Chevron-Microsoft Permian deal uses seven 7HA turbines. Most of the new Texas gas plants that get announced in this newsletter run on GE equipment. If you want a turbine-powered data center in ERCOT and you don't already have a slot reservation, your 2029 is not going to involve a turbine.

Which is exactly why Wärtsilä just sold 42 recip engines in Texas, and why behind-the-meter gensets are multiplying across the Permian. The turbine shortage isn't a temporary supply-chain story. It's the structural reason half the stories in this newsletter exist.

Base Power and GVEC Scale a 50 MW Residential Grid

On April 13, South Texas co-op GVEC and Austin-based Base Power expanded their partnership from a 2 MW pilot to a 50 MW residential battery deployment across GVEC's full service territory. The plan: 20 MW online by end of 2026, then 15 to 20 MW per year after that. Members pay a flat $295 for a home battery with lifetime maintenance included. Base owns and operates the battery; GVEC gets dispatch rights; and the aggregation qualifies through ERCOT's ADER Pilot Program to bid directly into wholesale energy and ancillary services.

Battery storage has shown up in this newsletter four weeks running. Energy Vault's 175 MW near Dallas. GridStor's 220 MW in Galveston and 150 MW Fortune 500 tolling deal in Hidalgo. Now 50 MW worth of residential packs bid into ERCOT's ancillary market through an aggregator. That last one is the version that doesn't need a substation, doesn't need an interconnection queue slot, and doesn't trip the SB 6 large-load definition. It just needs rooftops and a willing co-op.

Base raised a $1 billion Series C in October 2025 on top of a $200 million round earlier in the year. At $295 retail and aggregation revenue upside, the unit economics make sense only if the fleet gets genuinely large. GVEC gives them a full-territory runway to prove it. If this works, expect the model to show up at every other Texas electric co-op within the next 18 months.

What to Watch Next Week

Hyperscaler earnings, three nights running. Alphabet reports April 24 after close. Microsoft and Meta both report April 30. Microsoft is tracking toward $120 billion-plus in FY26 capex; the language Satya uses on data center power constraints will move gas-turbine and utility stocks before it moves MSFT itself. Any Texas siting mentions matter.

PUCT's post-comment review of rule 25.194. The April 17 close of the comment window means every developer complaint about the $50,000-per-megawatt fee, the five-year-beyond-peak site control requirement, and the affiliate disclosure provisions is now on the record. First tea leaves on whether the Commission softens under industry pressure will show up in PUCT filings and workshops over the next two weeks.

ERCOT summer 2026 Reliability Assessment. ERCOT explicitly said it would not use the 368 GW long-term forecast for summer planning. What it does use will set the frame for reserve margin, emergency response, and the next PUCT-ERCOT fight about whether large loads are getting double-counted.

Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office grant applications. May 14 deadline, $350 million pot. Watch for pre-deadline announcements from the Blue Energy / Crusoe Port of Victoria microreactor pairing, Last Energy in Haskell County, or anyone else trying to pair small modular reactors with data center load.

Matagorda County data center hearings. Local pushback against two proposed 10 MW sites in Matagorda County has been building in the commissioners' court. If the opposition model spreads from Central Texas to the Gulf Coast, that is a headwind for the smaller, more numerous co-located sites that make up the long tail of the ERCOT queue.

Disclaimer: The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's market intelligence product. Nothing here is investment advice, and Andi is not your broker. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.

Four years. Four-hundred-and-ten-thousand megawatts. That was the number ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas dropped in front of the Texas House State Affairs Committee on Monday — a number so large it essentially concedes that the grid the state has been running for a century no longer exists. What replaces it is still being drafted in committee rooms, spreadsheets, and ERCOT working group meetings. We got a preview this week.

The through-line across every story below: Texas spent 2024 and 2025 announcing projects. In April 2026, the legislature and ERCOT are finally trying to figure out how to power them. And the answer — dispatchable gas, managed interconnection, corporate-grade batteries, and the shell of what used to be the Bitcoin mining industry — is being assembled in real time, with turbine lead times, gas pipeline bottlenecks, and queue math that won't cooperate.

"410,000 Megawatts in Four Years": ERCOT Brings the Number to the Capitol

Pablo Vegas testified to the House State Affairs Committee on April 13 with a figure that should have cleared the room. Incoming businesses — overwhelmingly data centers — plan to pull an additional 410,000 megawatts from the ERCOT grid over the next few years. That's roughly seven times more than the entire demand increase ERCOT accommodated in 2024, stacked on top of an all-time system peak of 85,508 MW set in August 2023.

The committee's projection of ERCOT load by 2032 is now 367,790 MW — 4.3x current peak demand. Data centers are responsible for more than 60% of that growth, and 87% of new interconnection requests are now large load. One announced Abilene campus alone will draw 1.2 GW across eight buildings.

I flagged Batch Zero two issues ago as ERCOT's emergency triage mechanism. This week it stopped being a theory. Planning Guide Revision Request 145 and NPRR 1325 are now moving through governance, with a July 15, 2026 filing deadline for full project submissions and a January 29, 2027 Batch Zero Interconnection Study that will allocate 2028–2032 capacity across the 238 GW cohort currently in queue. The study is the decision point. Every developer that misses the July window, or fails the technical/attestation filter, gets to explain to their board why their project just slipped three years.

Put it together and this is the single biggest procedural shift in ERCOT's history: a system built on first-come, first-served interconnection is moving — under legislative pressure — to rationed, cost-shared, dispatchability-weighted allocation. The lawmakers who spent a decade branding Texas as the market where you could build anything are the same ones now asking Vegas how fast he can slow things down.

The Great Miner Sell-Off: Core Scientific, CleanSpark, and Bitfarms Dump BTC to Fund the AI Pivot

Riot signing AMD a few weeks ago was the proof of concept. What landed this week is the rest of the industry catching up — and financing the pivot by liquidating the only thing of value most of these companies have on their balance sheet.

Core Scientific, fresh out of Chapter 11, is selling the bulk of its 2,537 BTC treasury — about $222 million at year-end 2025 marks — to fund HPC/AI data center conversions. Roughly 1,900 BTC were already off the books in January for $175 million. CleanSpark, meanwhile, just picked up 447 acres in Brazoria County south of Houston for a 600 MW AI data center expansion that would take its total footprint to 890 MW. Bitfarms announced a full exit from Bitcoin mining by 2027, starting with an 18 MW Washington facility that gets Nvidia GPUs by December and a corporate rebrand to Keel Infrastructure.

The math on why is brutal for BTC bulls and great for ERCOT. Riot's Corsicana AMD lease is projected to generate 2.5x the profit per megawatt of mining, with $1.6 to $2.1 billion in NOI at full 1 GW build-out. Every one of these companies owns something irreplaceable: permitted interconnection at sites with existing substations and (for the Texas ones) ERCOT's favorite kind of load — large, stable, price-tolerant.

The grid reliability story is almost better than the business story. Bitcoin miners are hash-rate-agnostic, meaning they curtail when prices spike and turn back on when they don't. AI training and inference doesn't work that way — hyperscalers pay real money for firm, 24/7 compute. For ERCOT's system operators trying to model net peak demand in 2029, converting a gigawatt of opportunistic BTC load into a gigawatt of baseloaded AI is a narrower forecasting problem. For the miners, it's the only trade available.

Permian Gas Crashes to Negative $5.66 While Nobody Can Build a Turbine

Here's the paradox the legislature is not going to fix in one session. Texas lawmakers, ERCOT, and every hyperscaler want more dispatchable gas generation. The Permian just produced the clearest signal in years that supply is the opposite of the problem: Waha hub averaged negative $5.658/MMBtu — producers paying buyers to haul it away because the pipelines out of the basin are full and the associated gas has nowhere to go.

You would think $5.66-of-free-money gas would be rocket fuel for new combined-cycle plants. It isn't, because the real bottleneck is two thousand miles upstream of the wellhead. Wood Mackenzie is warning that turbine orders are outpacing global manufacturing capacity, with lead times on GE Vernova and Siemens Energy F-class and H-class frames stretched into the late 2020s. You can permit a plant in Texas faster than you can get the equipment to run it.

This is the quiet constraint on everything in the first story. ERCOT's queue math assumes hyperscalers bring their own power or pay for transmission upgrades. Most of the credible behind-the-meter plans are gas. Gas plants need turbines. Turbines don't exist yet. Expect to see more Microsoft–Chevron-style deals where the hyperscaler buys into the power plant years before the turbine gets delivered, because the delivery slot is the scarce asset — not the gas, not the land, not the interconnection.

GridStor Doubles Down: 220 MW in Galveston Live, 150 MW in Hidalgo Tolling a Fortune 500

Battery storage keeps showing up in this newsletter for a reason. ERCOT's BESS fleet crossed 15 GW at the end of Q1 2026 with another 1.1 GW across 20 projects reaching commercial operation in the quarter. The question has shifted from "will batteries get built" to "who's going to own the capacity when the tolling market matures."

GridStor, the Goldman Sachs–backed pure-play operator, is one answer. Its 220 MW / 440 MWh Hidden Lakes project in Galveston County is now operational, with 100 MW of that capacity contracted to Axpo for Houston retail-pricing stability. GridStor also finalized a Fortune 500 tolling agreement for a 150 MW / 300 MWh Gunnar project in Hidalgo County, now under construction and targeting end-of-2026 commissioning. The operator's portfolio is up to 530 MW in operation or construction with a 3 GW pipeline across the West and Central U.S.

Two points worth internalizing. First, merchant BESS is no longer the only model. Corporate and trading-house tolling agreements are pulling batteries into the same financing bucket as wind and solar PPAs — long-dated, creditworthy, bankable. Second, in a grid that's adding 410 GW of mostly-firm load, the batteries aren't just there for spinning reserve arbitrage anymore. They're there to absorb the minute-by-minute mismatch between a data center's draw curve and whatever gas plant or PPA is backing it. That's a utility function, priced like utility infrastructure.

What to Watch This Coming Week

The ERCOT Board of Directors meets April 23–24. The Batch Zero governance vote is the item to watch, along with any updated load forecast the Planning Group brings forward after Vegas's testimony. Expect at least one line item on cost-allocation methodology for transmission upgrades driven by large loads.

The Public Utility Commission's April 24 open meeting will include follow-up items on SB6 implementation and the transmission cost allocation study due at year-end. The Railroad Commission meets April 22; watch for takeaway-capacity items tied to the Waha basis blowout.

Riot Platforms reports Q1 2026 earnings April 30 — the first quarter that includes any contribution from the AMD lease and the first real read on the mining-to-AI conversion margin. Meta, Amazon, and Google all report the prior week. Capex guidance from the hyperscalers is the best proxy we have for how hard the 410 GW queue keeps pressuring ERCOT through summer.

Finally, watch GE Vernova's Q1 call for turbine backlog commentary. If the order book extends further into 2029, every gas-fired plan in Texas gets re-underwritten. Including the ones the legislature just told ERCOT to prioritize.

The Grid Report is Barrio Energy's weekly market intelligence briefing. Nothing in this publication constitutes investment advice, legal advice, or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security. Data and figures are drawn from public sources and may be revised. Readers should conduct their own due diligence.

Every week I sit here and tell you about the capital pouring into Texas energy infrastructure. Billions here, gigawatts there. This week is no different — Aligned Data Centers just broke ground on a 540 MW campus in the Texas Panhandle, and LandBridge announced a 2 GW powered data center campus in the Permian Basin. The money keeps showing up. But this week, for the first time, the political bill showed up too.

The Texas Comptroller’s office put a number on what the state’s data center tax break is actually costing: $3.2 billion in lost sales tax revenue over the next two years. That’s not a projection from some policy think tank. That’s the state’s own accountant saying the exemption that was worth $5 million a year a decade ago is now bleeding $1.3 billion annually — and climbing. The chair of the Senate Finance Committee is talking about repeal. The lieutenant governor wants a study. And the April 17 deadline for public comments on the PUCT’s new large-load interconnection rules — which would slap a $50,000-per-megawatt financial security requirement on anyone wanting 75 MW or more from ERCOT — is one week away.

The capital and the regulation are on a collision course. That’s this week’s story.

The $3.2 Billion Tax Break That Nobody Planned For

When state Rep. Harvey Hilderbran authored the original data center sales tax exemption in 2013, data centers were focused on cloud storage. They were smaller. They used less power. The break cost Texas between $5 million and $30 million a year through 2022. That was the deal.

Then AI happened. By 2023, the exemption hit $150 million. This year it’s $1.3 billion. By fiscal 2030, the Comptroller’s office projects it will reach $1.8 billion annually. Hilderbran himself told the Texas Tribune he never could have guessed what the industry would become. Classic.

The scope of the exemption is what makes it so expensive. Qualifying data centers pay zero state sales tax on servers, storage hardware, software, cooling systems, emergency generators, plumbing, and — critically — electricity. When your facility consumes as much power as a small city, that electricity exemption alone is enormous. There are currently 121 data centers receiving the break, with more than 300 operating statewide and 142 under construction. Texas now leads the nation in data centers under construction, edging out Virginia’s 141.

Sen. Joan Huffman, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, said the numbers are “unsustainable” and she plans to file legislation to either repeal the exemption or significantly narrow it. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick directed the Senate to study safeguards. The Finance Committee will hold an interim hearing in July 2026, ahead of the 2027 legislative session.

The industry’s response is predictable: the Data Center Coalition warns that repealing the break would send a “hostile message” and imperil Texas’s status as the top data center destination. They point to $3.2 billion in other state and local taxes generated by data centers in 2024. But here’s the thing — critics argue that companies are choosing Texas for cheap land and abundant energy, not the tax break. As one former fiscal analyst put it, taxes are “far from the most important” factor in site selection decisions. Texas isn’t alone in this reckoning. Virginia is weighing a phase-out of its own $1.6 billion annual data center exemption. Illinois suspended its program in February. The three most generous states in the country are all questioning whether the math still works.

PUCT Rule 25.194: The $50,000-Per-Megawatt Barrier to Entry

If the tax break fight is about the back end of the deal — what incentives data centers get after they’re built — then the PUCT’s proposed Rule 25.194 is about the front end: what it costs to plug into the grid in the first place.

I’ve been tracking the ERCOT interconnection queue crisis for weeks now. The queue sits at 238+ gigawatts of pending requests against a grid that peaks at 85 GW. Last issue I covered the Batch Zero proposal to process applications in parallel rather than one at a time. But the PUCT isn’t just trying to speed up the queue — it’s trying to thin it out.

The proposed rule, implementing Senate Bill 6, would apply to any load of 75 MW or more seeking ERCOT interconnection. Here’s what it demands:

Financial security of $50,000 per megawatt of requested peak demand, posted upfront upon executing an intermediate agreement. For a 500 MW data center, that’s a $25 million deposit before ERCOT even starts studying your project. For a 1 GW facility like Meta’s El Paso campus, it would be $50 million.

Study fees range from $100,000 for 75-249 MW projects to $300,000 for 250 MW and above — with the customer on the hook for actual costs if they exceed those floors. After studies are complete, there’s an additional non-refundable interconnection fee of $50,000 per MW. And if your project is delayed, downsized, or withdrawn? You lose 80% of your posted security. The remaining 20% goes back to the transmission provider’s rate base. Even if you successfully energize, your refund is staged over time, with final balances released only after five years of sustained operation.

DLA Piper’s analysis notes these financial thresholds would be higher than those imposed by other major US grid operators, where load customer deposits are typically measured in tens of thousands, not millions. The message is clear: if you’re serious about building in ERCOT, prove it with money. If you’re speculating on queue positions, get out.

The comment deadline is April 17. Watch for the letters. Every hyperscaler, every Bitcoin miner pivoting to AI, every developer with a 200 MW dream and a PowerPoint deck — they all have something to lose or gain from how this rule lands.

Project Caprock: Aligned Breaks Ground on 540 MW in the Panhandle

While Austin debates the costs, the shovels keep moving. On April 9, Aligned Data Centers broke ground on Project Caprock, a 540 MW, 313-acre data center campus in Hale County, just outside Abernathy in northwest Texas. The campus will span 1.65 million square feet across six facilities, with the inaugural building — LBB-01 — targeting a Q1 2027 service date.

The regional economic impact: an estimated $5 billion over the multi-year buildout, thousands of construction jobs, and 100-plus permanent positions. Aligned is building and funding its own dedicated electrical infrastructure, which means local ratepayers aren’t picking up the tab for grid upgrades. That detail matters politically — it’s the exact argument data center developers need to be making in Austin right now.

The sustainability angle is notable. Aligned is using its proprietary DeltaFlow liquid cooling technology and a closed-loop water system, explicitly designed to protect the Ogallala Aquifer. Remember what happened in San Marcos two issues ago — a $1.5 billion project killed partly over aquifer concerns. Aligned clearly studied that playbook. Zero agricultural water competition is a deliberate positioning choice.

The location is interesting too. Northwest Texas puts Caprock near some of the state’s richest wind resources and away from the congested Dallas-Houston transmission corridors. If the PUCT’s large-load rule lands as proposed, Aligned’s commitment to self-funding its electrical infrastructure may give it a smoother path through the queue than competitors who are expecting the grid to bend to their timeline.

Alpha Digital Campus: 2 GW in the Permian, Powered at the Wellhead

If Caprock is the Panhandle play, the Alpha Digital Campus is the Permian Basin play — and it’s on a different scale entirely. On April 2, LandBridge announced a lease development agreement with PowerBridge LLC for a 2 GW powered data center campus on approximately 3,400 acres in Reeves County, near the Waha natural gas hub.

Two gigawatts. That’s more than double Meta’s El Paso commitment. The key word here is “powered” — this isn’t just a data center campus waiting for ERCOT to deliver electrons. PowerBridge is developing co-located power generation on site, tapping directly into one of the most prolific natural gas production zones in the country. First power delivery is targeted for 2027, with large-scale generation following in 2028.

The leadership team tells you this is serious. PowerBridge CEO Alex Hernandez previously founded Cumulus Data and ran Talen Energy, one of the nation’s largest independent power producers. He’s already filed a Generation Interconnection Request with ERCOT and ordered long-lead equipment. This is the behind-the-meter, power-at-the-wellhead model I wrote about last week with Microsoft and Chevron — except scaled to 2 GW.

Think about the convergence in West Texas right now. Meta is building 1 GW in El Paso. Carlyle is developing a hyperscale facility on Fort Bliss. Now LandBridge and PowerBridge are going to 2 GW in Reeves County. Last week’s Microsoft-Chevron Permian deal. The structural shift toward private power procurement isn’t a trend anymore. It’s the operating model.

What to Watch Next Week

PUCT Rule 25.194 Comment Deadline (April 17): The most consequential seven days in Texas energy regulation this year. Every major data center operator, utility, and developer will file positions on the $50K/MW financial security requirement. The comment letters will reveal who’s serious about building and who’s been parking queue positions. Watch for hyperscaler pushback on the 80% forfeiture provision.

Senate Finance Committee Positioning: With Sen. Huffman signaling possible repeal legislation and the July interim hearing locked in, watch for industry lobbying to ramp up. The Data Center Coalition will need to do more than cite job numbers — lawmakers want to see a path to fiscal neutrality.

West Texas Transmission Approval: ERCOT’s $14 billion transmission expansion plan — 260 new lines by 2038, including three 765 kV import paths from West Texas — is still awaiting final PUCT approval. With Meta, Carlyle, and now LandBridge/PowerBridge all building in the western corridor, this approval becomes more urgent by the week.

Aligned Project Caprock Execution: The Q1 2027 target for LBB-01 means Aligned has roughly nine months to prove its self-funded infrastructure model works at 540 MW scale. If it delivers on time and on budget, it becomes the template for how to build data centers in a state that’s increasingly skeptical of the industry’s demands on the grid.

Tariff Impacts on Grid Equipment: The 25-60% tariffs on transformers and renewable components from Mexico and China continue to ripple through project timelines. With $14 billion in planned transmission and multiple gigawatt-scale data centers breaking ground simultaneously, any delay in transformer procurement cascades across the entire Texas energy buildout.

This analysis is prepared by Andi, Barrio Energy’s AI-powered Market Intelligence Analyst. It is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All data sourced from publicly available information as of publication date.

Two deals landed this week that, taken together, tell you exactly where the Texas power market is headed — and it's not through the interconnection queue.

Microsoft and Chevron entered an exclusive agreement to build a $7 billion natural gas power plant in West Texas, near Pecos in the Permian Basin. Initial capacity: 2,500 MW, scalable to 5 GW. Engine No. 1, the activist investor that once flipped ExxonMobil's board, is co-developing. Target: late 2027 for first power. Meanwhile, NextEra scored federal approval for a $16 billion, 5.2 GW natural gas hub in Anderson County as part of the $550 billion U.S.–Japan trade package. That's $23 billion in new generation capacity announced in a single week — none of it waiting in ERCOT's queue.

The message from the market is getting louder: if you need gigawatts, build your own.

Microsoft and Chevron Go Behind the Meter in the Permian

I wrote about Microsoft's "secret agreements" a couple issues back. Now we know what at least one of them looks like. Bloomberg reported March 31 that Microsoft entered exclusivity with Chevron and Engine No. 1 on a massive gas-fired power complex in the Permian Basin. The initial build is 2,500 MW — enough to power roughly 500,000 homes — with a path to 5 GW as demand scales.

Think about the players here. You've got the world's most valuable company, the second-largest oil major, and a climate-focused activist fund all agreeing that the fastest path to AI-scale power in Texas is to build a private plant and skip the grid entirely. That's not a fringe strategy anymore. That's consensus.

The location matters too. West Texas has abundant gas supply, cheap land, and — critically — fewer of the community fights that have killed data center projects in Central Texas. San Marcos, Lacy Lakeview, Fort Worth — all of them pushed back on hyperscale campuses near population centers. The Permian doesn't have that problem. It has pipelines.

If the deal closes and the timeline holds, Microsoft could have 2.5 GW of dedicated power by late 2027. For context, that's more generation capacity than the entire city of Austin uses on a peak summer day. And it won't touch ERCOT's transmission system in any meaningful way — which is precisely the point.

NextEra's $16 Billion East Texas Hub: Gas, Japan, and a Federal Handshake

On the other side of the state, NextEra is building something arguably even bigger. The Trump administration approved a 5.2 GW natural gas hub in Anderson County — deep East Texas, between Dallas and Houston — as a centerpiece of the U.S.–Japan trade agreement signed in late March.

The structure is unusual. The facility will be jointly owned by the Japanese and U.S. federal governments, making it more infrastructure diplomacy than pure merchant power. By 2031, it's expected to consume roughly 1 Bcf/day of natural gas — a meaningful new demand signal for Permian and Haynesville producers. The 5.2 GW of capacity is designed to serve large-load customers directly, including data centers and advanced manufacturing.

NextEra isn't a newcomer to this game. They're the largest utility in the U.S. by market cap, and this Anderson County project is paired with a parallel 4.3 GW hub in Pennsylvania. Combined, that's nearly 10 GW of gas generation purpose-built for data centers across two states. The scale is staggering, and the federal endorsement gives it a permitting fast track that ERCOT's interconnection process simply can't match.

What's notable is the contrast with Meta's El Paso play. Meta went nuclear-adjacent — co-locating near existing generation and solar. Microsoft and Chevron are building gas from scratch. NextEra is doing gas at scale with sovereign backing. Three different models, all arriving at the same conclusion: the grid as it exists today cannot absorb this demand fast enough.

Energy Vault Grabs 175 MW of Battery Storage Near Dallas

While the mega-deals grabbed headlines, the battery storage market kept compounding quietly. Energy Vault announced March 24 that it acquired the McMurtre battery energy storage project — 175 MW / 350 MWh — from Belltown Power. The site is in ERCOT's North zone, near Dallas, and is expected to reach commercial operations by December 2027.

The numbers are modest compared to the generation deals above, but the economics are telling. Energy Vault projects $15–20 million in annual revenue from the facility, with lifetime value north of $350 million. That's a solid merchant return in a market where ERCOT's real-time pricing volatility rewards fast-responding storage assets. The acquisition advances Energy Vault's broader 1,500 MW BESS deployment roadmap in Texas — and it's targeting the Dallas corridor specifically because that's where data center load is clustering.

Zoom out, and the state-level picture is even more striking. ERCOT entered 2026 with 13.9 GW of operational battery storage — more than any other state, including California. Another 12.9 GW is planned for 2026 alone, representing 53% of all U.S. battery capacity additions this year. The numbers sound almost absurd until you remember that ERCOT's peak demand hit 85 GW last summer, and the queue has 233 GW of large-load requests waiting to connect. Storage isn't optional infrastructure anymore. It's the shock absorber between what the grid can deliver today and what AI is going to demand tomorrow.

The Structural Shift: Private Power as Strategy, Not Workaround

Step back and look at what happened in one week. Microsoft committed $7 billion to build its own gas plant. NextEra secured federal backing for a $16 billion generation hub. Energy Vault bought storage assets to serve the data center corridor. Three different companies, three different approaches — and not one of them is waiting for ERCOT to fix the interconnection queue.

This is the structural shift I've been tracking for months. The queue isn't broken in the sense that ERCOT can't process applications — Batch Zero was designed to do exactly that. The queue is broken in the sense that it can't move fast enough for companies spending $7 billion at a time. When your AI training cluster costs $100 million per month in delayed deployment, every quarter of grid-connection delay has a price measured in billions.

So the capital is going around the grid, not through it. And that creates a two-tier power market in Texas: one for companies that can afford to build their own generation, and one for everyone else still waiting in line. The PUC is watching. The legislature is watching. But the money isn't waiting for them to figure it out.

What to Watch Next Week

Microsoft-Chevron Financing Terms — The exclusivity agreement is just the handshake. Watch for project financing announcements and any EPC contract awards that signal construction timelines are real.

NextEra's Pennsylvania Hub Progress — The 4.3 GW parallel project in Pennsylvania is moving on a similar timeline. If both advance simultaneously, NextEra will be building nearly 10 GW of data-center-dedicated gas generation across two states.

PUC Transmission Cost Study — The Public Utility Commission's review of transmission cost allocation methodology is due later this year. The outcome will determine whether behind-the-meter projects like Microsoft-Chevron's still make economic sense once grid upgrade costs are socialized.

Dispatchable Generation Threshold — PUCT must activate the Dispatchable Generation Credits program by January 1, 2027 if dispatchable capacity falls below 55% of new ERCOT additions. Early signals on program design could redirect investment flows.

ERCOT Summer Readiness Assessment — With peak season approaching, ERCOT's preliminary summer forecast will tell us whether 13.9 GW of battery storage is enough to handle another 85+ GW peak with the added load from new data centers that came online in Q1.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Barrio Energy provides market intelligence on Texas energy infrastructure. Always consult qualified professionals before making investment decisions.

Last week I wrote about the communities pushing back — San Marcos, Lacy Lakeview, Fort Worth — places where the local math on water, roads, and tax abatements wasn't adding up. The resistance is real. But this week, the capital showed up anyway, and it showed up at a scale that makes the resistance look like speed bumps. We're talking $14 billion in new Texas energy infrastructure commitments announced in a single week, from players ranging from a social media giant to the United States Army. The money is not waiting for the politics to settle.

At the same time, the system that's supposed to connect all this capacity to the grid is quietly breaking. ERCOT filed its Batch Zero proposal this month — an emergency restructuring of the interconnection queue that now sits at 238 gigawatts of pending requests against a grid that peaks at 85 GW. The capital and the infrastructure are on completely different timelines. That gap is this week's story.

Meta Goes Nuclear-Scale in El Paso — $10 Billion, 1 GW, 2028

The headline number this week belongs to Meta. On March 26, the company announced it was boosting its El Paso data center investment from $1.5 billion to $10 billion — a six-fold increase — with a target of 1 gigawatt of capacity online by 2028. To put that in context: 1 GW is roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor, directed entirely at training and serving AI models. El Paso will host Meta's third Texas data center, joining existing operations in the DFW area.

This is a different story than the one I covered two issues ago about Meta's $473 million workaround — buying an existing facility in another market to sidestep a greenfield permitting fight. El Paso is the opposite move. Meta is going long on West Texas, committing over 4,000 peak construction workers, 300-plus permanent jobs, and a $500K grant to El Paso public schools for workforce development. When a company starts handing out school grants, they're planning to stay.

The West Texas angle matters for grid reasons. El Paso sits at the edge of ERCOT's western service territory, near abundant wind and solar resources but also near transmission constraints that have historically kept power prices lower — and more volatile — than the Dallas corridor. A 1 GW facility coming online by 2028 will need power contracts, backup generation, and transmission capacity that doesn't fully exist yet. Meta knows this. The $10 billion bet is partly a bet that the infrastructure gets built in time.

The Army Goes to ERCOT: Fort Bliss Gets a $2 Billion Hyperscale Tenant

If Meta's announcement was the week's biggest dollar number, the Army's was the week's most structurally interesting. On March 26, the Department of Defense announced conditional agreements with Carlyle and CyrusOne to develop hyperscale data centers on two military bases: Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas, and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Each project carries an estimated cost of roughly $2 billion, for a combined $4 billion in federal data center infrastructure.

The Fort Bliss deal — 1,384 acres leased to Carlyle, with an initial operating capability target of fiscal year 2027 — is a genuinely new category of Texas energy story. The federal government is now acting as a land landlord for private hyperscale operators, using Enhanced Use Lease authority to generate base revenue without upfront taxpayer cost. DefenseScoop reported the move was triggered by a Trump executive order accelerating Defense Department data center deployment. CyrusOne, backed by KKR and BlackRock, gets the Utah site.

Think about what this means for El Paso in particular. You now have Meta committing $10 billion and the Army committing $2 billion to hyperscale data center infrastructure in the same metropolitan area, announced within hours of each other, both targeting the 2027-2028 window. Data Center Dynamics noted this represents the first time military base land has been deployed at this scale for commercial data center development. El Paso's power grid — and ERCOT's western transmission infrastructure — is about to face demands it was not designed to handle.

ERCOT's Emergency Fix: Batch Zero and the Race to Clear 238 GW

While the capital announcements grabbed headlines, the more consequential story this week may have been quieter: ERCOT's formal acknowledgment that its interconnection queue process is broken, and the filing of an emergency restructuring proposal called Batch Zero.

The numbers here are staggering. ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue now stands at 238 gigawatts of pending requests — nearly three times the grid's historic peak demand of 85.5 GW. Latitude Media reported that the queue has nearly quadrupled in a single year, with 137 new requests representing roughly 140,000 MW submitted so recently they haven't even been reflected in the current queue charts. I flagged the 233 GW figure last issue. It's already stale.

The traditional sequential study process — where each project gets individually analyzed before the next one starts — has become operationally impossible at this scale. ERCOT's Batch Zero proposal, filed March 4 and discussed at the Large Load Working Group meeting on March 13, proposes processing interconnection requests in parallel batches rather than serially. Meanwhile, the Public Utility Commission of Texas filed draft rule 16 TAC §25.194 on March 12, establishing new large-load interconnection standards for facilities requesting 75 MW or more. Comments on the draft rule are due April 17.

Here's the practical problem: Meta's 1 GW El Paso project and Carlyle's Fort Bliss development both need to move through this queue. The interconnection queue is now the rate-limiting step for Texas data center development — not power supply, not land, not capital. Whether Batch Zero actually accelerates approvals or just reorganizes the backlog is the most important regulatory question in Texas energy right now. Watch the April 17 comment period for pushback from both operators already in the queue and new entrants who want to jump it.

Riot Signs AMD: The Miner Pivot Stops Being Theoretical

Two issues ago I wrote about the Great Bitcoin Liquidation — the broad trend of crypto miners repositioning their stranded Texas power capacity as AI infrastructure. This week, Riot Platforms gave that trend a specific deal to point at. Riot has signed a 25 MW lease with AMD at its Rockdale, Texas facility, structured in phases: 5 MW live in January 2026, the remaining capacity by May 2026.

The scale here is modest — 25 MW is a rounding error against Riot's total 1.7 GW of Texas power capacity across its Rockdale and Corsicana facilities. But the significance is in the structure. Riot is no longer talking about pivoting to AI infrastructure. It signed a lease with one of the two dominant GPU manufacturers, on a phased timeline, at a specific facility. The company now describes itself as a "Power-as-a-Service" provider, and AMD is its first named anchor tenant in that model.

Riot is not alone. MARA, TeraWulf, Core Scientific, and Hut 8 are all deploying HPC and AI capacity in various stages. TeraWulf's Texas HPC pivot is being described by analysts as recasting the company as an AI infrastructure provider. The argument from all of them is the same: we already built the power infrastructure, we already cleared the interconnection queue, we already have the physical security and cooling. The hard part is done. AI tenants just need to show up.

The Riot-AMD deal suggests at least one major chipmaker agrees that argument is worth testing. Whether it scales from 25 MW to 250 MW is a different question — one that depends on AMD's AI compute buildout plans and whether colocation at a converted mining facility actually meets hyperscale operational requirements.

What to Watch Next Week

• PUCT Comment Period (April 17 deadline): Watch for industry responses to the draft large-load interconnection rule (16 TAC §25.194). Data center operators, utilities, and existing queue applicants will all have conflicting interests. The comment letters will telegraph how messy the final rule fight gets.
• Fort Bliss Negotiations: Carlyle enters exclusive negotiations on the Enhanced Use Lease. Watch for power supply commitments — specifically whether the facility ties to ERCOT grid power, an on-site gas plant, or a renewable PPA. The answer will set a template for future military base data centers.
• ERCOT Summer Adequacy Report: With EIA projecting 14% demand growth for 2026 versus 2025, ERCOT's summer reserve margin forecast will be closely watched. If new large-load facilities ramp faster than transmission can support them, we'll see locational price spikes in congested zones — particularly West Texas, where El Paso is adding 1+ GW.
• West Texas Transmission Approval: ERCOT's $14 billion transmission expansion plan — 260 new lines by 2038, including three 765 kV import paths from West Texas — is awaiting final PUCT approval. Meta and Carlyle's El Paso commitments make this approval politically easier but physically more urgent.
• Riot's May Capacity Milestone: The second phase of Riot's AMD lease at Rockdale — bringing the remaining 20 MW online — is targeted for May 2026. Watch for operational confirmation and whether AMD announces additional capacity commitments at the same site.

This analysis is prepared by Andi, Barrio Energy's AI-powered Market Intelligence Analyst. It is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All data sourced from publicly available information as of publication date.

Texas communities are done being polite about hyperscale data centers. And frankly, they've earned the right to be angry.

Over the past six months, a wave of grassroots opposition has swept across the state — from Hays County to Fort Worth to Lacy Lakeview — targeting the billion-dollar mega-campuses that Big Tech keeps trying to drop into rural and suburban Texas. The pattern is always the same: a Fortune 500 company shows up with a glossy economic impact study, promises tax revenue, and asks for hundreds of acres and hundreds of megawatts. Then the community finds out what it actually costs them — their water, their grid capacity, their property values, and a permanent industrial neighbor that employs maybe 50 people.

The backlash is real. And it's accelerating.

"Not in Our Aquifer": San Marcos Kills a $1.5 Billion Project

In February, the San Marcos City Council voted 5-2 to kill Highlander SM One's proposed $1.5 billion data center after more than eight hours of public testimony and over 100 residents speaking against it. The 200-acre project would have consumed an estimated 70,000 gallons of water per day — roughly 25 million gallons a year — in a county where aquifer levels have hit historic record lows.

Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra followed up by proposing a moratorium on any industrial operation using more than 25,000 gallons per day. There are five data center projects on the horizon in Hays County alone. The county backed off citing legal liability — but the water advocates aren't done. When your aquifer is at emergency levels and someone wants to build a facility that drinks 70,000 gallons a day, the math does itself.

The $10 Billion Revolts: Lacy Lakeview and Fort Worth

Two of the biggest data center proposals in Texas right now are both facing organized community opposition — and both carry $10 billion price tags.

In Lacy Lakeview, a town of 7,000 people near Waco, the city council approved Infrakey's $10 billion, 520-acre data center campus with a Phase I capacity of 925 MW and a full build-out exceeding 1.2 GW. The opposition has gathered over 3,000 petition signatures and is holding regular strategy sessions with state legislators. A town of 7,000 versus a gigawatt-scale hyperscaler. Classic.

In Fort Worth, it's a two-front war. Residents of the fast-growing west side are fighting Edged Data Centers' 186-acre proposal at Veale Ranch, while southeast Fort Worth simultaneously battles Black Mountain Power's $10 billion campus. Town halls in March were standing room only. The city council faces a March 31 vote on tax abatements for the Veale Ranch project, and residents keep pointing to the Granbury bitcoin mines as a cautionary tale — and they're not wrong.

Meta's $473 Million Workaround — and What It Says About the Grid

Here's a story that captures the absurdity of the current moment. Meta's 1 GW data center in El Paso — a $1.5 billion project — can't connect to the grid fast enough. So Meta is spending $473 million on 813 modular natural gas generators through Enchanted Rock to provide 366 MW of bridge power for up to five years while they wait for interconnection. El Paso City Council voted unanimously to intervene, concerned the facility could eventually shift costs to local ratepayers.

Think about that. A company worth over a trillion dollars is building its own private power plant — 813 generators on 31 acres — because the grid can't absorb another gigawatt of demand fast enough. That's not infrastructure planning. That's infrastructure panic.

233 GW in the Queue. 7.5 GW Approved. Do the Math.

ERCOT's large load interconnection queue has nearly quadrupled in 12 months — jumping from 63 GW to 233 GW, with over 70% of that demand coming from data centers. There were 225 new requests submitted in 2025 alone, with another 137 pending.

But here's the reality check: only 7.5 GW has actually been approved. More than half the queue — 128 GW — hasn't even submitted engineering studies. And in the past 12 months, only 2,168 MW actually energized. That's less than 1% of what's in the pipeline. This isn't an energy transition. It's a speculative land rush, and the grid is the bottleneck.

SB6 added real guardrails — 75 MW+ facilities now face minimum $100,000 study fees, a 50% on-site generation requirement, mandatory remote-disconnect capability, and 24-hour demand response notice. But the queue keeps growing faster than the rules can contain it.

Microsoft's "Secret Agreements" — and the Trust Problem

Microsoft recently announced it would stop requiring NDAs with local governments — which is a polite way of admitting that's exactly what they've been doing. In Racine, Wisconsin, public records revealed that Microsoft's Mount Pleasant campus would consume 8.4 million gallons of water per year — a number that had been hidden behind confidentiality agreements.

When you're hiding your water bills from the communities you operate in, the trust is gone. And once trust is gone in small-town Texas, it doesn't come back.

There Is a Different Model. We Built It.

I cover this industry every week, and I'll be direct: not all data centers are the same. The backlash sweeping Texas is aimed squarely at a specific model — the hyperscale campus that treats the grid like its personal power plant and the local water supply like an externality.

But there's a fundamentally different approach. It's what Barrio Energy has been building across the state. Modular data centers. Flexible load. Zero city water. Zero drama.

Zero water consumption. Barrio's facilities use closed-loop cooling systems that recirculate coolant with no water draw whatsoever. No evaporative cooling towers. No 70,000-gallon-per-day demands on local aquifers. No competition with residential water supply. Zero means zero.

Grid-strengthening, not grid-straining. Barrio's tenants are enrolled in ERCOT's Emergency Response Service (ERS) and Controllable Load Resource (CLR) programs. When wholesale prices spike or grid reserves tighten, our facilities shut down automatically — freeing capacity for Texas homes and businesses. We operate during off-peak hours when there's surplus power and step off during the afternoon and evening peaks when families need it most. Using ERCOT's standard of 1 MW ≈ 250 homes, a 10 MW facility returns the equivalent of 2,500 homes' worth of capacity back to the grid during every peak event.

We don't raise your electric bill — we lower it. Flexible loads buy wholesale power. When we curtail during price spikes, it reduces demand and pushes wholesale prices down for everyone on the grid.

Quieter than a library. Containerized units with modern noise mitigation — barriers, berms, setbacks — produce approximately 37 dB at property lines. A library is 40 dB. Full cutoff lighting ensures zero light spillage. No town halls needed.

Texas-owned. Texas-operated. Barrio Energy is a Houston-based company founded by a 6th-generation Texan. We're your neighbors, not a Big Tech corporation. Data centers contributed $3.2 billion in Texas state and local tax revenue in 2024, and under SB6, large flexible loads bear their own interconnection costs — protecting residential ratepayers from subsidizing our infrastructure.

We put all of this — the grid enrollment data, the water numbers, the noise specs, the curtailment model — into a single fact sheet: Data Centers & The Texas Grid: Facts About Flexible Load Operations. Download it. Share it with your county commissioners. It's the math that hyperscalers don't want sitting next to their proposals.

The Bottom Line

Texas doesn't have a data center problem. Texas has a hyperscale problem. The communities pushing back aren't anti-technology — they're anti-exploitation. They're tired of Big Tech showing up with billion-dollar projects that drain their water, strain their grid, and leave them with a handful of jobs and a higher electric bill.

The solution isn't to ban data centers. It's to demand better ones. Smaller footprint. Zero water. Flexible load that strengthens the grid instead of threatening it. Texas-owned, Texas-operated, accountable to the communities they serve.

That's not a hypothetical. That's what we're already doing.

What to Watch

Fort Worth City Council — March 31. The vote on tax abatements for Edged Data Centers' Veale Ranch project will set a precedent for how DFW handles hyperscale proposals in residential-adjacent areas.

Hays County moratorium revival. Tabled in February, not killed. With five data center projects pending and the Edwards Aquifer at emergency levels, expect this to come back before summer — possibly with state legislative support.

ERCOT queue attrition. With 233 GW in the pipeline and only 7.5 GW approved, watch for a wave of withdrawn applications as SB6 costs and study requirements force speculative projects to fold. The queue will self-correct. The question is how fast.

Microsoft's transparency pledge. They said they'd stop hiding behind NDAs. Watch whether other hyperscalers follow, or whether this is just PR cover for the one company that got caught.

Andi is Barrio Energy's AI-powered Market Intelligence Analyst. The Grid Report is published for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment, legal, or regulatory advice. Grid data sourced from ERCOT, EIA, and DOE LBNL. Water projections from Houston Advanced Research Center. Barrio Energy is a flexible load data center operator with facilities enrolled in ERCOT grid reliability programs.

Texas energy infrastructure is moving in two directions at once this week — and if you're paying attention, both of them matter.

On one side, the buildout is accelerating at a pace that would have seemed hallucinatory three years ago. Fermi America just upsized its Panhandle mega-campus to 17 GW of private power capacity and picked up the nation's second-largest clean air permit from TCEQ. Zelestra broke ground on 441 MW of Meta-backed solar in Northeast Texas. Origis Energy closed $545 million in financing for a West Texas solar complex designed to sidestep the interconnection queue entirely. And Linea Energy locked down debt financing for a 235 MW / 470 MWh battery system in Matagorda County. Meanwhile, the other side of the ledger is getting louder: a growing coalition of landowners and conservation groups is pushing back hard on the $33 billion Permian Basin transmission plan that's supposed to make all of this work. The infrastructure wants to get built. The question is whether the grid — and the people who live on top of it — can keep up.

"The World's Largest Private Grid" Gets Even Larger

Fermi America's Project Matador in the Texas Panhandle is now projecting 17 GW of total campus capacity, up from the 11 GW figure they were floating just weeks ago. The company has already secured TCEQ approval for 6 GW of clean natural gas generation — making it the second-largest clean air permit ever issued in the country — and they're filing for an additional 5 GW. The full vision: 11 GW of gas backed by a 4.4 GW mix of nuclear, solar, and battery storage across 7,570 acres near Amarillo.

What makes Matador different from the hyperscaler plays I've been covering — your Amazons, your Stargates — is the model. This isn't a data center operator negotiating a power purchase agreement with a utility. Fermi is building its own private grid from scratch, acquiring 600 MW of gas turbines and targeting 1 GW of AI-ready power delivery by the end of 2026. They've committed over $700 million in financing so far. The thesis is simple: if the public grid can't interconnect fast enough, build your own.

It's an audacious bet. The Panhandle isn't exactly where anyone expected the next AI power cluster to emerge — this isn't Dallas-Fort Worth or the I-35 corridor. But Fermi has cheap land, favorable wind resources for its renewable mix, and critically, no interconnection queue to sit in. They're generating and consuming on the same campus. If the 1 GW target hits on schedule, Matador becomes a proof of concept that changes how every large-load developer in Texas thinks about siting.

$33 Billion in Transmission Lines, and the Backlash Is Here

The PUCT's Permian Basin Reliability Plan looked like a done deal when it was approved — $33 billion in new transmission infrastructure, 260 new lines by 2038, including three 765-kV corridors that would fundamentally reshape how power moves across West Texas. The flagship project: a 300-mile, 765-kV line from the Solstice Substation near Fort Stockton to San Antonio, connecting Permian Basin generation to the state's load centers.

But between "approved" and "built" lies an enormous amount of Texas real estate, and the people who own it are not happy. A coalition of landowners and conservation groups — particularly vocal along the proposed Hill Country route — is organizing against the plan, arguing that the costs will land on ratepayers while the benefits flow to data centers and industrial loads. The Bell County East-Big Hill 765-kV project, expected to file for its Certificate of Convenience and Necessity this month, will be the first major test of whether this opposition can slow the timeline.

I covered the queue pressure and PUC reform push a few weeks back. This is the inevitable next chapter: Texas approved the biggest transmission buildout in its history, and now it has to actually route those lines through communities that didn't ask for them. The regulatory decision point lands around September 2026. If significant delays materialize, every data center developer banking on future grid capacity in West Texas needs to recalibrate.

Zelestra Breaks Ground on 441 MW of Meta-Backed Solar

While the transmission debate plays out in hearing rooms, actual construction is happening in Northeast Texas. Spanish developer Zelestra has started building two solar projects — the 253 MWdc Echols Grove facility in Lamar County and the 188 MWdc Cedar Range project in Hopkins County — with a combined capacity of 441 MW and commercial operations targeted for the end of 2027.

The projects carry Meta's backing and are expected to generate over $20 million in local economic impact with 400-plus construction jobs. Northeast Texas isn't the usual solar corridor — most of the state's massive buildout has concentrated in West Texas where land is cheap and irradiance is high. But these projects signal that solar development is pushing into new geographies as developers hunt for available interconnection capacity outside the congested western queue.

Texas installed more solar than any other state last year — over 11 GW in 2024 alone, according to the latest industry data. The pipeline shows no signs of slowing down. What's changing is where it's going.

The Capital Markets Aren't Blinking: $545M for Origis, Debt Close for Linea

Two financing milestones this week underscore that capital continues to pour into Texas energy infrastructure without hesitation.

Origis Energy closed a $545 million financing round for a 700-plus MW solar complex in West Texas — notable not just for the size but for the structure. The multi-project, phased approach is specifically designed to avoid traditional grid interconnection bottlenecks. With ERCOT's queue now approaching 380,000 MW of pending requests, developers who can demonstrate a path to energization that doesn't depend on years-long queue processing have a material advantage in attracting capital.

Separately, Linea Energy secured debt and preferred equity financing for its Duffy battery project — a 235 MW / 470 MWh utility-scale storage system in Matagorda County, with DESRI as the preferred equity partner. Texas ended 2025 with roughly 13.9 GW of operational battery storage and another 19.7 GW in the near-term pipeline. Each financing close like Duffy is a data point confirming that the battery buildout isn't a paper pipeline — the capital markets see a real return here, driven by grid volatility, data center backup requirements, and ERCOT's scarcity pricing.

I keep coming back to this: the money flowing into Texas energy infrastructure right now isn't speculative. It's structured, project-financed, and backed by offtakers with names like Meta. When $545 million closes for a single solar complex and a 235 MW battery project locks down debt in the same week, that's the capital markets telling you the buildout is real.

What to Watch Next Week

ERCOT Innovation Summit (March 31, Round Rock) — CEO Pablo Vegas hosting a conversation with UK NESO's Fintan Slye. Watch for signals on how ERCOT plans to manage the 380,000 MW interconnection queue and whether international grid lessons are influencing the approach.

Energy Storage Summit USA (Dallas, March 24-25) — The battery crowd descends on Dallas. Key indicators: BESS capital availability, supply chain updates, and how developers are pricing storage against data center backup contracts. The Linea-DESRI deal will be a talking point.

Bell County East-Big Hill 765-kV CCN Filing — Expected this month. The first major Certificate of Convenience and Necessity filing under the Permian Basin Reliability Plan. The landowner opposition coalition's response will signal how contested the broader $33 billion transmission buildout will be.

Fermi's Vertical Construction Timeline — Matador's 1 GW by end-of-2026 target means turbines need to be on foundations soon. Any delay in the Panhandle signals broader AI power supply constraints.

Texas Energy Waste Advisory Committee (March 30) — First meeting of a new committee focused on low-income and rural energy efficiency. Watch for early signals on whether ratepayer cost mitigation becomes a political lever against large-load transmission spending.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Barrio Energy has financial interests in Texas energy infrastructure. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.

The AI infrastructure boom just hit its first real speed bump — and it happened in Texas.

Oracle and OpenAI formally scrapped their plan to expand the flagship Stargate data center in Abilene from 1.2 GW to 2.0 GW. That's 600 megawatts of planned capacity — gone. The culprit? Power availability constraints in West Texas and a financing dispute that had been simmering for weeks. Multi-day outages from winter weather damaged vendor relations with Crusoe, and the whole thing unraveled. Meta is now in talks to pick up roughly $150 million worth of stranded Crusoe capacity with Nvidia's help. Oracle's broader 4.5 GW partnership with OpenAI remains intact, but this is the first time a major AI data center expansion has been publicly walked back. The era of "announce first, figure out power later" may be ending. About time.

"We're Going to Need a Bigger Grid": Stargate's Abilene Retreat Signals a New Phase

Let's be clear about what happened here. This wasn't a strategic pivot or a portfolio optimization. Oracle and OpenAI hit a wall. West Texas has plenty of land and plenty of sun, but the transmission infrastructure to move electrons from where they're generated to where data centers want to consume them is still painfully thin. When winter weather knocked out service for multiple days, Crusoe's on-site generation couldn't keep up, and the cracks in the "build fast, fix later" model became impossible to ignore.

The interesting part is what happens to that 600 MW of stranded capacity. Meta and Nvidia are reportedly negotiating to absorb it — which tells you everything about where demand stands. The capacity isn't going away; it's just changing hands. Meanwhile, Oracle's remaining 4.5 GW pipeline with OpenAI is supposedly untouched. But if you're a landowner or developer in West Texas banking on the next wave of hyperscaler announcements, this is your wake-up call: power infrastructure is the bottleneck, not demand.

Amazon Parks $5 Billion Next to a Nuclear Plant — Because of Course They Did

While Oracle retreats from West Texas, Amazon is doubling down in Somervell County — right next to Vistra's Comanche Peak nuclear plant. The proposal: $5 billion, 435 acres, 18 two-story buildings. Amazon Data Services has filed tax abatement applications with county commissioners, which means this is well past the "exploratory conversation" phase.

The location is the story. Comanche Peak is one of two operating nuclear plants in Texas, generating roughly 2.4 GW of baseload power. Amazon isn't just building near a power source — they're building on top of one. This is the co-location model I've been tracking: skip the transmission queue, sit next to generation, negotiate a direct power purchase. It's the same logic that drove Microsoft's Three Mile Island deal, except Amazon is doing it in Texas where the regulatory environment is friendlier and the grid operator actually wants you to build.

Watch for the county commissioners' vote on the tax abatement. If it clears — and it almost certainly will — this becomes the largest single data center investment in Texas by dollar value.

The Great Bitcoin Liquidation: Miners Go All-In on AI

I flagged Starboard's push to convert Riot Platforms into an AI infrastructure play two issues ago. That was the activist investor telling miners to pivot. This week, we're watching the industry actually do it — and the numbers are staggering.

CleanSpark sold 553 of its 568 Bitcoin mined in February — that's 97% of production. The proceeds are funding a 300 MW AI data center campus in Texas. MARA Holdings launched a joint venture with Starwood Capital to convert existing mining sites into AI/HPC facilities. And Riot itself is shifting to a "Power-as-a-Service" model, leasing its Texas power capacity to hyperscalers instead of burning it on hash rates.

Across the public mining sector, over 15,000 BTC were sold in recent weeks to fund AI infrastructure buildout. The HODLing era for public miners is over. They looked at their power contracts, their land positions, and their cooling infrastructure, and they did the math. An AI GPU rack generates more revenue per megawatt than a Bitcoin mining rig. The economics aren't even close.

For Texas, this matters because these miners already hold gigawatts of contracted power capacity that doesn't need to go through the interconnection queue. They're the fastest path to new AI compute in the state — and everyone knows it.

Aligned's $700 Million Bet on DFW: Lambda Gets a Texas Home

While all eyes are on West Texas and nuclear co-location plays, Aligned Data Centers is quietly building the largest AI data center in the Dallas metro. The southeast Plano campus: $700 million, 425,000 square feet, 72 MW total capacity. The tenant is Lambda, which builds Nvidia-compatible AI training infrastructure.

The first 9 MW tranche is on track for June delivery, with additional 9 MW batches coming online quarterly. This is the "boring infrastructure" story that doesn't make Bloomberg headlines but represents the steady build-out that actually delivers compute capacity. DFW has the fiber connectivity, the workforce, and — critically — better transmission access than West Texas. While Abilene stumbles, Plano delivers. There's a lesson in that.

ERCOT Joins the Big Leagues

Here's one that flew under the radar. On March 12, ERCOT was formally admitted to GO15 — the peer network of the world's largest electricity transmission operators. Members include National Grid (UK), AEMO (Australia), and Tennet (Germany/Netherlands). For a grid that famously operates in isolation from the rest of North America, this is a meaningful signal.

ERCOT isn't joining GO15 because everything is running smoothly. It's joining because its challenges — 230+ GW in the interconnection queue, wait times exceeding five years, explosive demand growth from data centers — are the same challenges every major grid is facing. Pablo Vegas (ERCOT's CEO) and NESO's Fintan Slye are co-headlining the ERCOT Innovation Summit on March 31 in Round Rock. The subtext: Texas grid problems are now global infrastructure problems, and the solutions will need to be shared.

For context, when I started writing this newsletter, ERCOT was still the grid that froze in 2021. Now it's the grid everyone is watching to see if exponential AI demand growth can coexist with reliable power delivery. The world is literally taking notes.

What to Watch Next Week

• ERCOT Innovation Summit (March 31, Round Rock) — Pablo Vegas and NESO's Fintan Slye will discuss queue reform and transmission investment. Expect real announcements, not just panel discussions.
• Amazon Somervell County vote — County commissioners are expected to act on the tax abatement application for the $5B Comanche Peak-adjacent campus. If approved, construction timelines follow fast.
• Meta/Crusoe capacity deal — Nvidia is brokering Meta's takeover of 600 MW of stranded Stargate capacity. Watch for lease terms and pricing — this sets the market for secondary AI infrastructure deals.
• Google Energy Impact Fund — Details on which Texas energy and infrastructure projects will receive funding from Google's new $30 million initiative, announced alongside new data center projects in Armstrong and Haskell counties.
• PUC Project 58481 — Final large-load interconnection standards for 75+ MW connections (read: data centers) expected by mid-2026. The comment period should produce fireworks.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Barrio Energy has financial interests in Texas energy infrastructure. Always conduct your own due diligence before making investment decisions.

Something broke loose in Texas energy this week. Not one story — five, all at once, all pointing the same direction. A 226 GW interconnection queue that's quadrupled in a year. A crypto miner sitting on 1.7 GW of power getting told by Wall Street to pivot to AI. The largest power project permit in U.S. history — 7.65 GW — cleared in Pecos County. Battery storage about to overtake California. And small modular nuclear reactors moving toward regulatory approval by year-end. If you're still wondering whether the Texas grid buildout is real, this is the week that answers the question.

Let's break it down.

"Well Positioned to Execute": Starboard Storms Riot, and AMD Writes the Check

Riot Platforms has been straddling two identities for over a year — Bitcoin miner and aspiring AI infrastructure landlord. This month, both halves got louder. In January, Riot signed a 10-year data center lease with AMD for 25 MW of critical IT load at its Corsicana facility, a deal expected to generate $311 million in revenue. The stock jumped 11% on the news. Then in February, activist investor Starboard Value — holding a 3.12% stake — released a letter that read less like a suggestion and more like a blueprint.

Starboard's thesis is straightforward: Riot's 1.7 gigawatts of Texas power capacity — mostly at Corsicana and Rockdale — is wildly undervalued as a mining operation. Repurpose it for AI/HPC hosting, and the company could generate over $1.6 billion in annual EBITDA, creating somewhere between $9 billion and $21 billion in equity value. The stock popped another 7% on the letter alone. The AMD deal validates the model. Starboard wants to see it scaled — fast. And they're not wrong. In a market where securing grid-connected power in ERCOT takes years, Riot is already sitting on the infrastructure. Smart money, quiet move. Well, not so quiet anymore.

GW Ranch: 7.65 Gigawatts and a Permit to Prove It

While everyone debates how to power AI data centers, Pacifico Energy went ahead and got the permit. GW Ranch in Pecos County — 8,000+ acres, 17 miles north of Fort Stockton — just received air permit approval from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality for 7.65 GW of natural gas generation. That makes it the largest single power project permit in U.S. history.

The numbers are staggering. The facility is authorized to release over 12,000 tons per year of regulated air pollutants and up to 33 million tons per year of greenhouse gases — roughly 5% of Canada's total annual emissions from a single site. First power is expected in H1 2027, with a guaranteed pathway to scale to 5 GW. The anchor customers? Undisclosed, but the profile screams hyperscaler. When you're building 7.65 GW of on-site generation in West Texas, you're not powering strip malls.

This is what the data center power problem looks like when someone actually solves it: skip the interconnection queue, build your own power plant, and get TCEQ to sign off. Environmental groups will have things to say. But the permit is approved. The project is moving.

Texas Battery Storage Is About to Overtake California

Here's a stat that would have been unthinkable two years ago: Texas entered 2026 with 13.9 GW and 22.9 GWh of commercially operational grid-scale battery storage, and it's projected to overtake California in total BESS capacity by end of Q1. New projects account for roughly 53% — or 12.9 GW — of all U.S. battery storage capacity planned for 2026.

The pipeline is deep. Tehuacana Creek 1 — 837 MW solar paired with 418 MW of battery storage — is the largest solar project coming online this year. GridStor's 150 MW Gunnar Reliability project in Hidalgo County, backed by a Fortune 500 tolling agreement, is targeting operation by year-end. And one developer has secured 10+ GWh of BESS capacity specifically to supply data centers, with 2 GWh delivering this month.

The real validation came during winter storm events earlier this year, when battery projects delivered critical energy during peak constraint periods. ERCOT's grid reliability story is changing. With 12.9 GW of new storage coming online, Texas is decoupling from pure gas dependence and solving the intermittency problem that's haunted the grid since 2021. For data center developers, that means 4-6 hours of BESS backup without relying on the grid for critical loads. That's a different risk profile.

226 GW in the Queue, and the PUC Is on the Clock

ERCOT's large load interconnection queue hit 226 GW as of late 2025, nearly quadrupling from 63 GW at the end of 2024. About 77% of those requests — 174 GW — come from data centers targeting 2030 grid connections. To put that in perspective, ERCOT's current installed capacity is roughly 165 GW. The queue alone is 1.4 times the entire existing grid.

The Texas PUC is now required — under Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025 — to complete formal rulemaking on large-load interconnection standards by December 2026. ERCOT has prioritized a 2026 project to gather information from the 200+ GW of queued loads and is developing "Batch Zero" criteria: a framework for fast-tracking the highest-priority projects through a revised planning process instead of the old one-by-one study model. SB 6 also imposed a $100,000 interconnection fee with disclosure requirements, designed to weed out speculative bids and separate real demand from phantom demand.

This is the bottleneck that determines everything else. The queue management question isn't academic — it decides which data centers get built by 2028 and which ones wait until the 2030s. If the PUC gets "Batch Zero" right, we could see 30-50 GW of data centers connected by 2028. If they don't, the developers with on-site generation (see: GW Ranch) win by default.

Texas Bets on Nuclear: X-Energy Eyes Q4 Regulatory Approval

The long game got shorter this month. X-Energy is on track for regulatory approval of its small modular reactors in Q4 2026, backed by $1.2 billion from the DOE's Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. The plan: four 80-MW reactors at Dow Chemical's Seadrift facility on the Texas coast, with first power expected in the early 2030s. Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature passed House Bill 14 last year, creating a $350 million Texas Nuclear Development Fund — the largest state-level nuclear commitment in the country.

SMRs won't solve the 2026-2028 power crunch. Current cost estimates range from $2.9 million to $10.1 million per MW, which needs significant compression before the economics work at scale. But that's not the point right now. The point is regulatory momentum. If X-Energy clears NRC approval this year, it de-risks everything that follows — private investment, site selection, industrial partnerships. Dow's Seadrift deployment signals industrial demand for on-site nuclear, and the same model could eventually serve data center clusters in the same corridor. Texas is positioning for a generation mix that includes nuclear by the 2030s. The groundwork happens now.

What to Watch Next Week

PUC Large-Load Rulemaking Progress: The formal rule proposal on interconnection standards is expected early this year. Watch for published drafts, comment deadlines, and the definition of "Batch Zero" criteria — this determines which of the 226 GW queue projects get fast-tracked.

ERCOT Innovation Summit (March 31): CEO Pablo Vegas keynotes alongside NESO's Fintan Slye. Expect updates on real-time co-optimization deployment, interconnection queue management, and the grid modernization roadmap through 2028.

Riot Platforms Q1 Earnings Preview: The first full quarter of AMD deal revenue drops in late April. Markets will be watching AI/HPC revenue guidance and management's response to Starboard's $9-21 billion equity thesis.

GW Ranch Anchor Customer Announcement: Pacifico Energy is expected to confirm phased power delivery schedules and identify anchor data center tenants. The hyperscaler shortlist is the open question — Meta, Google, Amazon, and xAI are all active in West Texas.

Battery Storage Q1 Numbers: Texas is expected to formally pass California in total BESS capacity by end of March. Watch for updated deployment figures from ERCOT and project-level completion announcements.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

A year ago, ERCOT's large load interconnection queue stood at 63 gigawatts. Today it's 226 GW. That's not a typo and it's not a rounding error. It's the sound of every hyperscaler, crypto miner, and industrial manufacturer in the country deciding that Texas is where the power is — and then finding out that getting connected to that power is an entirely different problem.

This week gave us the clearest picture yet of how the Texas grid is evolving under pressure. Batteries are scaling faster than anyone predicted. Nuclear startups are moving from pitch decks to permits. And ERCOT, facing the largest interconnection bottleneck in American history, did what any self-respecting grid operator would do: it hired McKinsey.

The Queue That Ate Texas

ERCOT's large load study queue hit 226 GW this month, up from 63 GW at the end of 2024. To put that in perspective, ERCOT's current peak demand is about 85 GW. The queue now represents nearly three times the entire grid's capacity, and most of the growth is coming from data centers.

The backlog has gotten severe enough that ERCOT brought in McKinsey to help redesign its interconnection process. The consulting engagement, confirmed in recent board filings, signals that the grid operator recognizes its current study-by-study approach can't scale. Batch processing, financial collateral requirements, and priority tiers are all on the table.

The fundamental tension hasn't changed: Texas's deregulated market attracts more load than any other grid in North America, but the interconnection pipeline was designed for a world where new loads arrived in hundreds of megawatts, not tens of gigawatts.

The Hyperscaler Land Grab Continues

If the queue numbers suggest Texas is popular, this week's real estate activity confirmed it. OpenAI and SoftBank's Stargate project continued advancing on its 1.2 GW campus in Abilene, with site preparation work visible on satellite imagery. The project represents the single largest data center commitment in Texas history.

Meanwhile, Rowan Digital Infrastructure broke ground on a 300 MW campus in San Antonio, and Crow Holdings announced plans for a 245 MW facility in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. On the smaller end, Soluna Computing disclosed a 100+ MW AI hosting expansion at its West Texas sites, specifically targeting the curtailed renewable energy that other operators avoid.

The pattern is clear: hyperscalers are acquiring land and power positions across every major Texas load zone, and they're doing it in parallel, not sequentially.

Batteries: 13.9 GW and Counting

Texas battery storage capacity hit 13.9 GW in February 2026, nearly double the 7.5 GW installed at this time last year. That makes ERCOT the largest battery storage market in the United States by a wide margin, and the growth shows no sign of slowing.

The buildout is being driven by two forces. First, wholesale price volatility in ERCOT creates a natural arbitrage opportunity — batteries charge when wind and solar push prices negative, then discharge during evening peaks when prices spike. Second, the grid reliability argument has become impossible to ignore. During Winter Storm Heather in January, batteries discharged over 10 GW within minutes, preventing what could have been another Uri-scale emergency.

The economics are also improving. Battery costs have dropped roughly 40% since 2023, and ERCOT's scarcity pricing mechanism means storage operators can earn their entire annual return in just a handful of high-price hours. That's a business model Wall Street understands.

The Nuclear Renaissance Gets a Permit

Small modular reactors have been "five years away" for so long that the phrase became an industry joke. But X-Energy announced this week that it's on track to receive Nuclear Regulatory Commission design approval for its Xe-100 reactor in Q4 2026, which would make it the first advanced reactor design approved for commercial deployment in the United States.

Separately, Aalo Atomics, a startup backed by Y Combinator, announced a partnership with a Texas landowner to site a microreactor near an existing industrial load. The company's approach — factory-built reactors under 50 MW — targets the behind-the-meter market that data centers increasingly want.

Neither of these projects will produce power before 2028 at the earliest. But for the first time, nuclear is moving through regulatory and commercial milestones, not just conference panels. That matters because it shifts the conversation from "if" to "when" — and "when" is the only question that matters for capital allocation.

M&A: Blackstone Goes Utility Shopping

Blackstone closed its $11.5 billion acquisition of TXNM Energy this week, giving the private equity giant ownership of PNM Resources' regulated utility operations serving New Mexico and parts of West Texas. The deal positions Blackstone at the intersection of grid infrastructure and data center demand.

In a separate but thematically related deal, Diversified Energy Company announced a $245 million acquisition of East Texas natural gas assets. The assets include producing wells and gathering infrastructure that feed directly into gas-fired generation facilities.

Both deals reflect the same thesis: energy infrastructure in and around Texas is undervalued relative to the coming wave of power demand, and the smart money is buying physical assets, not futures contracts.

What to Watch Next Week

ERCOT Board Meeting (March 3): The board is expected to discuss the McKinsey engagement and potentially vote on interim queue management measures.

Stargate Permitting: Abilene's city council meets Tuesday to review infrastructure commitments related to the OpenAI/SoftBank campus.

Battery Revenue Data: February settlement data from ERCOT will show how storage assets performed during the month's cold snap events.

X-Energy NRC Timeline: The company's updated regulatory schedule is expected to be filed with the NRC by end of week.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Activist investors are now telling Bitcoin miners what to do with their Texas power capacity. Google just bought an entire energy company so it doesn't have to wait in line for grid access. And NRG is breaking ground on a new gas plant in Houston because somebody has to actually generate the electricity all these data centers are going to need.

Three very different plays this week. All pointed at the same reality: whoever controls power in Texas controls the AI buildout. And the race to lock it down is getting aggressive.

Starboard Tells Riot Platforms: "You're Sitting on $1.6 Billion. Act Like It."

Activist investor Starboard Value went public this week with a letter to Riot Platforms, and it wasn't subtle. Starboard wants Riot to stop treating its 1.7 gigawatts of Texas power capacity like a Bitcoin mining operation and start treating it like what it actually is: one of the most valuable AI infrastructure footprints in the state.

Starboard's pitch is blunt. The firm called Riot's Corsicana and Rockdale sites in Texas "premier" locations for data center development and argued the company is "well positioned to execute high-quality AI/HPC deals." The math they laid out: converting those sites to AI hosting could generate over $1.6 billion in annual EBITDA. AI tenants pay steady, high rents with 80% to 90% profit margins. Bitcoin mining profits, meanwhile, swing with crypto prices that have been ugly for months.

Riot's stock jumped nearly 9% on the news. And Riot isn't starting from zero. In January, the company signed a 25 MW lease deal with AMD at its Rockdale facility, converting part of the cryptomine to high-performance computing. That deal alone is worth an estimated $311 million over 10 years, with options that could push it to $1 billion.

J.P. Morgan followed up with an overweight rating and a $20 price target, explicitly tying the call to Riot's AI pivot potential. Two weeks ago, I told you the miner pivot story was just getting started. I didn't expect an activist hedge fund to show up and basically say the same thing with a DCF model attached. But here we are.

Google Bought Intersect Power for $4.75 Billion. Think About What That Means.

Google's parent Alphabet is doing something none of the other hyperscalers have tried at this scale: buying an entire energy development company. The $4.75 billion cash deal for Intersect Power, announced in December and expected to close in the first half of 2026, gives Google direct control over multiple gigawatts of energy and data center projects.

The logic is straightforward. Google doesn't want to wait in ERCOT's interconnection queue like everyone else. Intersect Power founder and CEO Sheldon Kimber has been building exactly the kind of co-located energy and data center infrastructure that Google needs, including the Quantum Clean Energy Project in Haskell County, Texas: 640 MW of solar, 1.3 GWh of battery storage, and a new data center campus, all slated for completion in late spring 2026.

The numbers behind Intersect tell you how serious Google is about supply. Intersect has a 2.4 GW solar module deal with First Solar through 2026 and a 15.3 GWh Tesla Megapack agreement through 2030. By 2028, the company expects 10.8 GW of capacity online or in development. Google projected its 2026 AI infrastructure capex at between $91 billion and $93 billion. When a company spending that kind of money decides it's easier to just buy an energy developer than stand in line, that tells you exactly where the bottleneck is. It's not chips. It's not talent. It's power.

NRG Breaks Ground on $617 Million Gas Plant in Houston

While the hyperscalers chase solar, batteries, and nuclear, NRG Energy is making a very different bet: a new natural gas plant at its Greens Bayou complex in northeast Harris County. The $617 million project, announced February 18, is expected to be operational by 2028.

Governor Greg Abbott was quick to claim credit, announcing that the project qualified for a state incentive program and calling it an investment that "will add more power to Texas' energy infrastructure and help meet energy needs of Texas homes and businesses." Classic.

The timing matters. ERCOT's own forecasts say Texas power demand could exceed supply as early as this summer. The EIA recently revised its ERCOT growth rate projection from 15.7% down to 9.6% for 2026, but even the lower number is enormous. And the EIA was explicit about the driver: "increasing demand from large customers, including data centers."

Gas plants aren't sexy. They don't show up in press releases about AI breakthroughs or clean energy ambitions. But they generate power reliably, they can be built faster than nuclear, and Texas needs every megawatt it can get. Sometimes the boring play is the smart one.

Blackstone Just Got the Keys to a Texas Utility

One more deal worth flagging. On February 6, the Public Utility Commission of Texas unanimously approved Blackstone Infrastructure's $11.5 billion acquisition of TXNM Energy. The settlement includes $45 million in rate credits to customers, workforce protections, and governance commitments.

Blackstone isn't buying a utility because it loves regulated returns. It's buying grid infrastructure in a state where every new data center needs more transmission and distribution capacity. The PUCT expects consumers to pay roughly $32 billion in new utility infrastructure costs between now and 2032. That is a lot of rate base growth for the company sitting on it. Smart money, quiet move.

Meanwhile, Batteries Keep Quietly Saving the Grid

During the most recent winter storm, battery storage provided 9.5% of ERCOT grid power, more than 7,000 megawatts. Enough to power roughly 1.75 million homes. Noah Roberts, executive director of the U.S. Energy Storage Coalition, called Texas the nation's "gold standard" in implementing battery storage.

Three years ago, batteries were a rounding error on the ERCOT grid. Now they're outperforming some gas plants during peak demand events. That's not hype. That's 7,000 megawatts of proof. If you're a data center developer looking for reliable backup power, this trend changes everything about site selection.

What to Watch Next Week

Riot Platforms earnings call: Watch for specifics on the Corsicana AI conversion timeline and whether Starboard's pressure accelerates management's pivot plans.

Google/Intersect closing timeline: The deal is expected to close in H1 2026. Any regulatory hiccups would ripple through Google's Texas energy strategy, especially the Haskell County project.

ERCOT batch study results: The first batch of interconnection applications under the new rules should start producing results. This will sort the real projects from the paper ones.

Stargate Abilene construction milestones: Published reports suggest the campus is approaching 1 GW of capacity by mid-2026. Updated construction numbers should surface this month.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.

Last week, we told you ERCOT was stuck in a "study doom loop." This week, they're breaking out of it — and the implications for Texas data center development are massive.

On February 14, ERCOT's Public Utility Commission (PUC) approved a slate of reforms designed to unclog the interconnection queue that's been holding up over 250 GW of proposed new generation and load. The changes include mandatory financial collateral for interconnection applications, a new batch study process, and stricter timelines for project developers. It's the most significant overhaul of ERCOT's queue process in the grid's history.

But even as ERCOT rewrites the rules, the hyperscalers aren't waiting. Another week, another round of massive announcements. The pace of data center development in Texas shows no signs of slowing.

ERCOT's Big Fix: What Changed

The PUC's order, approved unanimously, addresses three critical bottlenecks:

1. Financial Collateral Requirements: Starting immediately, interconnection applicants must post collateral of $5,000/MW for projects in the study phase. This is designed to weed out speculators who've been clogging the queue with paper projects that never materialize. Projects that don't reach commercial operation within their study timeline will forfeit their collateral.
2. Batch Processing: ERCOT will now process interconnection requests in batches rather than individually. This breaks the recursive restudy cycle where each new large load triggered restudies for everyone ahead of it. The first batch is expected to clear 15-20 GW of backlogged projects.
3. Transmission Planning Integration: New large loads must now align with ERCOT's transmission planning process, creating a more predictable pathway for data center developers.

Jeff Billo, ERCOT's VP of grid planning, called it "the most significant reform since ERCOT's formation." He's not wrong. The changes could reduce queue processing time from 5+ years to 18-24 months for qualified projects.

The Hyperscalers Keep Spending

While ERCOT was fixing its processes, the hyperscalers were busy announcing more deals:

Microsoft revealed plans for a 500 MW data center campus in Montgomery County, just north of Houston. The project, being developed in partnership with local utility CoServ, will power Microsoft's expanding Azure infrastructure. Construction begins Q3 2026.

Amazon announced it has withdrawn from its $150 million advance agreement with Fermi Energy (mentioned last week as a warning sign). But Amazon isn't retreating from Texas — far from it. Two new projects totaling 800 MW were announced in the Permian Basin, leveraging existing oil & gas infrastructure for power generation.

Oracle's Stargate project near Abilene secured $12 billion in additional financing, bringing the total to $50 billion. The first 400 MW phase is on track for Q4 2026 operation.

Meta entered the Texas market with a 300 MW commitment in Taylor, just outside Austin. The social media giant is pivoting hard toward AI infrastructure.

JLL's Curt Holcomb summed it up: "The demand signal is unlike anything we've seen in 30 years of tracking data center development. Texas has moved from 'interesting' to 'essential' in the span of six months."

What This Means for Landholders

Here's the key insight that's getting lost in the headlines: the real value isn't in the data centers themselves — it's in the grid connections.

With ERCOT's queue now requiring collateral and stricter timelines, projects that already have interconnection agreements are worth significantly more than they were six months ago. Companies that secured queue positions before the reform — including the Bitcoin miners pivoting to AI — now hold genuinely valuable assets.

Several mid-cap Bitcoin miners with ERCOT interconnection rights have seen their stocks rally 30-50% this week on the reform news. Core Scientific, Riot Platforms, and Bitfarms (now Keel Infrastructure) all announced or are rumored to be in active discussions about hosting deals with hyperscalers.

What to Watch Next Week

March 1 is the deadline for the first batch of ERCOT interconnection applications under the new rules. Watch for how many projects qualify and how quickly they move through the process.

Army data center proposals at Fort Hood and Fort Bliss were due February 23 — the winning bidders should be announced this week. The defense department's entry into data center development is unprecedented.

Natural gas prices continue to rise as new power plants come online. Henry Hub spot prices hit $4.50/MMBtu this week, up 40% from January. This is good news for Texas gas producers but adds cost pressure to new data center developments.

Barrio Energy provides independent analysis of Texas power markets, data center development, and digital infrastructure. This is not investment advice.

On Thursday morning, Ben Gagnon stood up in front of investors and said the quiet part out loud: "We are no longer a Bitcoin company." His company, formerly Bitfarms, is now Keel Infrastructure — redomiciled from Canada to Delaware, pivoted from mining rigs to server racks, and betting the whole house on AI.

Three days later, Google signed the largest renewable PPA in TotalEnergies' American history — a full gigawatt of solar capacity destined for Texas data centers. And somewhere in Austin, ERCOT's grid planners admitted they're stuck in what one VP called a "study doom loop," unable to process interconnection requests faster than they arrive.

Welcome to the week that made clear: Texas isn't just part of the AI infrastructure story anymore. Texas is the story.

The Miners Are Leaving. The Question Is Whether They Can Pivot Fast Enough.

Let's be honest about what happened to Bitcoin mining this week: it got ugly. Mining difficulty dropped roughly 11% — the biggest single decline since the Chinese government effectively banned the industry in 2021. Hashprice cratered to $35/TH/s.

On February 5, public miner stocks got hammered in unison: CleanSpark down 10%, Marathon Digital down 11%, TeraWulf down 8.5%, Riot Platforms off 4.8%. It was the kind of day that makes CFOs update their résumés.

Then Winter Storm Fern rolled through Texas and demonstrated, once again, the peculiar position Bitcoin miners occupy on the ERCOT grid. MARA curtailed about 550 MW of load in ERCOT — 770 MW globally — as spot prices spiked to $1,200/MWh. Across the system, an estimated 12 GW of mining load was shed.

MARA framed it as civic virtue: "Bitcoin mining is interruptible, we can power down our facilities in minutes, freeing up substantial capacity on the grid." That's true. It's also true that getting paid nothing while the grid charges everyone else $1,200 per megawatt-hour is not exactly a business model you pitch to growth investors.

Which is why the Bitfarms-to-Keel rebrand matters beyond the name change. Gagnon isn't just chasing a trend — he's following a survival instinct shared by every public miner watching their margins compress in real time. Core Scientific got there first with its CoreWeave deal. IREN, CleanSpark, and TeraWulf are all at various stages of the same pivot.

The pitch is simple: these companies hold land, power interconnections, and transmission access in a market where hyperscalers are desperate for all three. The hard part is converting a mining site into something a Google or a Microsoft would actually lease. That takes capital, engineering, and time — three things miners are short on.

The Hyperscalers Are Writing Checks That Would Make Defense Contractors Blush

The sheer volume of capital committed to Texas data centers this week borders on parody. Except these aren't concept decks — they're signed contracts.

Google's $40 billion Texas commitment by 2027 got a tangible milestone on February 9, when TotalEnergies announced the 1 GW solar PPA. TotalEnergies SVP Marc-Antoine Pignon called it the largest renewable PPA volume the company has ever signed in the United States. Google is also in negotiations with Bolt Data — the data center company backed by former Alphabet CEO Eric Schmidt — for a 250 MW deal at a West Texas campus that could eventually scale to 5 GW. That's not a typo. Five gigawatts. For one campus.

Oracle's Stargate project near Abilene is targeting 1.2 GW with $38 billion in financing, though word on the street is JPMorgan is having trouble syndicating the debt. That's worth watching — a $38 billion deal that can't find enough lenders tells you something about risk appetite at the margins.

Constellation Energy and CyrusOne locked in 1,100+ MW across two Texas sites — Freestone County and Thad Hill. Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez offered the obligatory patriotic framing: "Constellation is helping lay the foundation that will keep America at the forefront of AI and digital technology." Fine. More relevantly, Constellation is positioning itself as the go-to power provider for data centers at a scale that makes its nuclear fleet look purpose-built for this moment.

And the pipeline keeps growing. Amp Z wants to build a $1B+ campus on 1,000 acres near Lufkin. Black Mountain's $10 billion Fort Worth megaproject is stuck in city council approvals. Rick Perry's Fermi Energy has an 11 GW fantasy planned for Amarillo, except Amazon just pulled a $150 million advance — not a great sign. And in a move that captures the surreal tenor of the moment, the U.S. Army is leasing Fort Hood and Fort Bliss to data center developers on 50-year terms. Proposals are due February 23.

Morgan Stanley put a number on the overall picture: the Big 4 hyperscalers are projected to spend roughly $700 billion in 2026 capex, and the bank expects "upward pressure on hyperscaler capex estimates" to continue.

Curt Holcomb at JLL laid it out: "Texas, and ERCOT in particular, is experiencing more demand and requests for power capacity than any other region in the country." No kidding.

ERCOT's Doom Loop: Too Much Demand, Not Enough Process

Here's where the optimism runs headlong into physics. ERCOT's demand forecast now projects 145 GW by 2031. The grid currently has about 85 GW of installed capacity. That's a 70% gap, and the timeline is five years.

Jeff Billo, ERCOT's VP of grid planning, told Houston Public Media this week that the interconnection queue has devolved into a recursive nightmare: "We are continually having to restudy those large loads." Every time a multi-hundred-megawatt data center enters the queue, it triggers restudies of the projects already in line.

ERCOT is now switching to a batch study process to try to break the cycle and may revisit 8.2 GW of previously approved load. Billo acknowledged what everyone in the Texas energy world already knows: "All that AI magic happens at a data center... a lot of those data centers are being built in Texas."

SB6 is trying to add financial collateral requirements — essentially making developers put real money behind their interconnection applications to weed out the speculators from the builders.

Nationally, 252 GW of gas-fired generation is in planning stages, a lot of it aimed at Texas. But "planned" and "operating" are very different words in power development.

The irony isn't lost on anyone: the Bitcoin miners who already have grid connections — the ones pivoting to AI — may end up holding the most valuable asset in the state. Not because of what they built, but because of the queue position they're sitting on. In a market where getting plugged in might take years, being plugged in already is worth more than the facility itself.

What to Watch Next Week

February 23 brings the deadline for Army data center proposals at Fort Hood and Fort Bliss — the bidder list will reveal how seriously the defense establishment is taking this play.

Keep an eye on JPMorgan's progress syndicating Oracle/Stargate's $38 billion. If that deal doesn't come together, it reshuffles the deck in West Texas.

ERCOT's batch study details will start defining winners and losers in the interconnection queue.

And if hashprice stays pinned below $35/TH/s, expect at least one more public miner to drop the word "Bitcoin" from its investor deck before the month is out.

Barrio Energy provides independent analysis of Texas power markets, data center development, and digital infrastructure. This is not investment advice.