The Environmental Integrity Project published a report on July 1 that did something nobody in Texas had bothered to do: it counted the gas plants. Not the ones utilities are building for the grid — the ones being built to sit behind a data center fence and never touch a wire ERCOT controls. The national number is 74 plants of 100 MW or larger. Thirty-two of them are in Texas, which is nearly half, and more than any other state has.

Those 32 plants, running at maximum permitted capacity, would emit more than 287 million tons of greenhouse gases a year. The report's own comparison is 61 million cars. Mine is simpler: the entire national fleet of 74 plants comes to roughly 662 million tons, which is about what Australia emits annually. Texas is carrying 43 percent of that on its own.

"It Makes No Sense for a Technology of the Future to Be Powered by the Dirty Fossil Fuels of the Past"

That line is from Jen Duggan, EIP's executive director, and it is the kind of quote that gets a report covered. The more useful number is buried further in: alongside the carbon, the 32 Texas plants are permitted for more than 20,000 tons of nitrogen oxides and 14,000 tons of fine particulate matter annually. NOx is the one that matters locally, and West Texas — where a large share of this is going — has thin air monitoring coverage to begin with.

The counties named are Comal, Anderson, Bexar, Pecos and Caldwell. The projects named are the ones you would expect if you have been reading this newsletter: Fermi America's Project Matador near Amarillo, Pacifico's GW Ranch Energy Center in Pecos County, Comstock Resources' Texas Power Generation Hub, the FO Permian Partners complex. Pecos County keeps showing up. It showed up when Microsoft went shopping there in June, and it is showing up here as the site of one of the largest air permits in the country.

Griffin Bird, the report's lead author, made the argument that the industry has the least good answer for: "There is no limit on how much solar can scale up. And it can scale a lot quicker than a lot of the gas-fired power plants that are being proposed." He is right on the interconnection math and wrong on the thing the buyers actually care about, which is firmness at 3 a.m. That tension is the whole Texas power market in one sentence, and neither side is arguing in bad faith.

San Marcos Zones Data Centers Out of Existence

On June 16, the San Marcos City Council voted 4 to 3 to define "data center" in its zoning code and then make it an ineligible use in every single zoning district in the city. Not a moratorium. Not a setback rule. A definitional ban.

This is more dangerous to developers than the county moratoria that have been collapsing under legal pressure all year, and the reason is jurisdictional. Moratoria are temporary by construction and vulnerable under 2025's HB 2559. Zoning is a home-rule municipal power, and 352 Texas cities have home-rule authority. If the San Marcos ordinance survives, it is a template that can be copied by ordinance in an afternoon.

State Senator Paul Bettencourt has said he intends to challenge it, arguing it functions as an indefinite moratorium and therefore violates HB 2559. That is a real argument, and it will get tested. In the meantime, San Marcos told the Tribune that other cities have already called to ask how it was drafted. Nobody wants to be first. Everybody wants to be second.

Six Turbines, No Tenants

Fermi America had a June 30 that is worth watching in slow motion, because the largest single line item in the EIP report spent it fighting itself.

At 8:30 that morning, Fermi announced it had selected Primoris Energy Services for balance-of-plant engineering and construction on the first six Siemens SGT-800 turbines at Project Matador. Read the release carefully and it is a selection, not a signed EPC — the parties will "continue to advance scope, schedule and execution plan toward a final EPC agreement." Primoris has finished the excavation for all six power islands, so there is real dirt moving. There is not yet a contract.

At 4:00 that afternoon, co-founder Toby Neugebauer — who beneficially owns 146.5 million shares and is running a consent solicitation against the board — held a town hall and said, on the record in an SEC filing, that Fermi had internally planned June 30 as "the day that we would announce 2 tenants." No tenants were announced. Of the Primoris release, he said he "almost felt baited."

Treat that framing as what it is: a dissident shareholder's characterization, filed in a proxy fight, not a company statement. But two things are independently verifiable and less arguable. Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones both backed Neugebauer's card on June 29. And on June 30, Fermi filed a notice of non-suit dismissing its own declaratory-judgment action in Texas Business Court, days after the court granted Neugebauer expedited discovery into the board's 70 percent supermajority bylaw. Companies that expect discovery to go well do not usually dismiss the case that produces it.

Matador is an 11 GW behind-the-meter promise. EIP scores it at more than 40 million tons of greenhouse gas per year at full permitted operation, against New York City's roughly 48 million tons across power, transport and waste combined. That is one campus in the Panhandle approaching one of the largest cities on earth. Whether it gets built now depends less on turbines than on whether anyone signs a lease.

KKR Pays $4.2 Billion. A Scurry County Battery Gets a Waiver.

Two filings, two days apart, pointing in opposite directions.

On June 30, KKR agreed to acquire EDF power solutions' North American operations for roughly $4.2 billion in equity value, plus up to $390 million in earnouts. It is the largest single renewable-sector investment KKR has ever made, for a platform that has developed 26 GW in North America. KKR's Cecilio Velasco tied the thesis directly to data center expansion and reshoring. The release does not itemize Texas megawatts, so I am not going to invent a number, but you do not buy a top-ten US renewables platform in 2026 without buying ERCOT exposure.

Also on June 30, Vistra filed an amendment upsizing its revolving credit facility to $5.50 billion from $3.44 billion, releasing all guarantors and removing collateral reinstatement requirements. The largest generator in ERCOT just gave itself two billion dollars of additional unsecured flexibility. Nobody does that to sit still.

And on July 1, Energy Vault disclosed that its Cross Trails project — 57 MW and 114 MWh in Scurry County, inside ERCOT — had entered a consent and waiver with its lenders, who waived default for failing to meet debt service coverage requirements for the quarters ending March 31 and June 30. Two consecutive quarters. The lenders also modified the DSCR methodology through the end of 2027 and lowered the minimum ratios, which is the polite version of moving the goalposts.

So: global capital paid a record price for a renewables platform on a data-center thesis in the same week a merchant ERCOT battery needed a covenant waiver to keep going. Both are true. The spread between them is where the next two years of this market actually lives.

Wind Set a Record. Solar Set a Record. Nobody Noticed.

The week ending July 3 was the grid's quietest strong performance of the year. Wind averaged 22.00 GW over the full week, an all-time weekly record, and way above the five-year range. Solar averaged 12.39 GW, also a record, by nine hundredths of a gigawatt. Coal came in at 7.90 GW, which is historically low, and gas at 22.98 GW.

Weekly average load hit 69.71 GW against a standing record of 69.91 GW from August 2024. It missed by 0.2 GW. Daily peaks reached 82,122 MW on June 30 and 81,759 MW on June 28, the latter running 1.6 percent under forecast.

There were no conservation appeals, no grid watches, no emergency alerts and no scarcity pricing. Prices ran lower on average, and the West and Panhandle zones showed daytime price flatlines from surplus renewables. Raw year-over-year load growth was 11.0 percent; temperature-adjusted it was 5.4 percent, with the eight-week adjusted average at 5.0. That adjusted figure is the honest one. The rest is weather.

Worth stating plainly because the aggregators keep getting it wrong: batteries did not set a record this week. The hourly storage mark is still 10,372 MW from March 13. It came close on Saturday and did not get there.

What to Watch Next Week

July 10 is the Batch Zero customer deadline. ERCOT's legacy large load study process expires at end of day, and Batch Zero takes over on July 11. Projects that want in need their technical studies and documentation to their DSP or TSP by then, with utilities forwarding to ERCOT by July 24. This is the first hard filter on a queue that is nominally north of 400 GW. Watch how much of it actually files.

July 4 is the OBBBA construction cliff for wind and solar. Projects that have not begun construction by Saturday lose the 45Y and 48E runway and face a hard end-2027 placed-in-service date. SEIA counts 200-plus GW of solar safe-harbored through 2030 against only about 23 GW of wind. ERCOT's queue skews solar and storage, so the post-holiday filings will show who made it under the wire.

July 9 is the next PUCT open meeting, the first since June 25. Project 58481 and its proposed $50,000 per MW security requirement for loads at or above 75 MW are still proposed, not adopted. That rule has been sitting since March.

Does anyone sue San Marcos. Bettencourt has promised a challenge. The other 351 home-rule cities are waiting to see whether the ordinance holds before copying it.

Does Fermi land a tenant. June 30 came and went. An 11 GW campus with no anchor lease is a very expensive hole in the Panhandle.

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.