Shave one megawatt off your demand at the system peak and Texas will save you money on transmission. How much money depends entirely on what kind of customer you are. For a commercial or industrial customer, the answer is about $68,550 a year. For a residential customer, the same megawatt of avoided peak is worth about $94.
That is a ratio of roughly 727 to 1 for delivering the identical benefit to the grid. The figure comes out of the record in PUCT Docket 58484, and as far as I can tell nobody has put it in front of a trade audience yet. It is the cleanest single expression of the thing Texas spent this week failing to resolve.
Abbott's Deadline Arrived. The Memo Did Not.
Governor Abbott's June 10 directive gave the PUCT and ERCOT until July 17 to deliver a joint memorandum to his office: what they can do under existing authority, where the statute stops them, and what legislation they want. I flagged that clock when it started. It ran out yesterday.
As of this writing I can find no public confirmation that the memorandum was filed or released. That is not necessarily a failure — a memo to the Governor's office is not required to be a public filing, and it may surface next week. But it means the single most consequential document in Texas energy policy right now is one that nobody outside two agencies has read.
What we do know is what Abbott asked for, and it is not subtle. He wants the legislature to codify data-center cost responsibility, to require that large loads "add to capacity, not just demand", to mandate closed-loop cooling, to require annual electricity and water reporting, and — the one that will draw blood — to repeal the data center sales tax exemptions. Texas spent a decade recruiting this industry with tax policy. The Governor is now asking the legislature to take the recruitment tools back.
Separately, the PUCT has until July 31 to initiate action on reducing residential transmission costs. That is nine business days after a deadline it may or may not have met.
Five Dockets, and the One Number That Explains Them
The who-pays question is not being decided in one place. It is spread across five open proceedings, and they interlock in ways that are easy to miss if you only follow one.
58481 is large load interconnection standards — the proposed 16 TAC §25.194, published March 12, carrying the $50,000 per MW security requirement for loads at or above 75 MW. Still proposed. Not adopted. It has been sitting for four months. 58482 is the Large Load Demand Management Service. 58484 is transmission cost recovery, where the 727-to-1 figure lives. 58480 is load forecasting. 58000 is the long-term transmission cost allocation work under SB 6.
The connective tissue is worth noticing: the PUCT has decided to improve its large-load forecasting by incorporating actual baseline usage from Batch Zero projects. Which means the interconnection process I wrote about last week is not just a queue filter — it is about to become the state's primary instrument for finding out what these facilities actually draw, as opposed to what their letters of agreement claim they will draw. Those two numbers have never been the same.
On the size of what is being forecast, the sources disagree and I am not going to pretend otherwise. EDF's July 14 analysis counts roughly 335 data centers operating in Texas with at least 247 in development, and projects state demand rising nearly 60 percent in under four years. Floodlight's reporting a week earlier put it closer to 300 operating and 200-plus in development. Both are defensible depending on where you draw the line on what counts as a data center and what counts as "in development." Neither is small.
The Record That Didn't Happen
Everyone spent the spring being told July would break the ERCOT peak demand record. July is now more than half over and it has not.
ERCOT's summer forecast put the 2026 peak at 92,211 MW, in a range topping out near 98,000. The all-time record remains the 85,508 MW set on August 10, 2023. Last summer's peak was 83,679 MW. ERCOT put the odds of a grid emergency in July at 0.21 percent, and so far the grid has spent the month validating that number rather than the headlines.
The week ending July 10 ran near-record on a weekly average basis at 69.71 GW, against the 69.91 GW record from August 2024, and this week the expectation drops to 63.64 GW as rain moves in. Wind fell back to 12.85 GW for the week after the extraordinary 22.00 GW record two weeks ago, with this week expected near 10.87. Coal is running historically low at around 8.5 GW.
The useful read on load growth is still the temperature-adjusted one: 6.0 percent year over year, with the eight-week average at 4.9. The raw print of 14.3 percent is mostly heat, and anyone quoting it at you without the adjustment is either selling something or has not looked.
None of which means the summer is over. August is when ERCOT records actually get set — the standing peak, the standing weekly average, both are August marks. But it is worth saying clearly, because the incentive in this industry runs entirely the other way: the grid has handled a 60 percent demand-growth narrative, a 438 GW queue and a record-hot stretch without an emergency alert. The crisis everyone is planning around is real in 2029. It was not real this week.
What to Watch Next Week
July 24 is the utility-side Batch Zero deadline. DSPs and TSPs must forward eligibility packages to ERCOT. First real look at how much of the 438 GW queue submitted anything at all.
July 31 is the PUCT's residential transmission deadline. Watch 58484 and 58000 for the opening move — and watch whether the 727-to-1 disparity gets addressed directly or quietly parked.
The Abbott memorandum, whenever it surfaces. It contains the legislative ask for 2027, which means it contains the answer to whether the sales tax exemption survives.
August 7 classification notices, August 31 deficiency cure. The sorting of 438 GW toward roughly 100 happens on that calendar.
Adoption of 16 TAC §25.194 in Docket 58481. Four months proposed and counting. Until it is adopted, the $50,000 per MW number that everyone is planning around is not actually a rule.
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.
