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. Links go to primary sources wherever possible; form your own view.