At 7:16 p.m. on Monday, August 31, ERCOT issued Market Notice M-A080326-03, informing the market that it "requires additional time to complete its data validation and due diligence processes" and would release the conditional Batch Zero classifications "later this week." August 31 was the deadline. It was also the replacement deadline, granted by the Commission on August 20 after ERCOT missed the original August 7 date. The grid operator has now missed the extension it asked for, on a list that determines which of roughly 300 data centers get to stay in the study that decides whether they get power.

The list did land, on Thursday afternoon, in M-A080326-04. Three days late on a 24-day extension is not a scandal. It is a tell. While ERCOT's front door was closed for data validation, the capital that needs Texas power spent the week going around it: buying land next to substations that already exist, stacking three balance sheets on a bitcoin miner's interconnection agreement, laying gas pipe instead of waiting for a study, and taking a company with zero operating data centers public on the strength of a Milam County lease. The Commission, for its part, approved 400 miles of 765-kV wire and drew an amicus brief from the Attorney General for its trouble. Around the queue, not through it.

"Later This Week": Batch Zero Ships on a Thursday

Thursday's notice tells each transmission and distribution utility which of its large loads are conditionally in Batch Zero — subject to eligibility verification, subject to curing dynamic-model deficiencies, or subject to a good-cause exception the Commission has yet to grant. The utilities have two business days to pass that along to the load. Loads moved from "base" to "studied" can file a Section 9.3.1 dispute, and anyone denied gets 14 business days to resubmit under a different eligibility subparagraph. ERCOT also said it "will not seek a good cause exception for every Large Load that requested it," which is the sentence in the notice worth reading twice.

The classifications start the clock on the disputes, but not on the study. ERCOT's general counsel told commissioners on August 20 that the April 9, 2027 Batch Zero study deadline will be missed and that ERCOT was "still working on what that new timeline might be" — I printed that quote last week and it has not aged. At the August 26 Technical Advisory Committee, ERCOT confirmed that approvals to energize data center and crypto facilities of 75 MW and up are paused until the eligibility verification is complete, with the verification report now planned for December 10. The same TAC meeting took multiple ballots on ERCOT's 2027 Ancillary Services methodology and passed none of them, so the reserve procurement plan for a year in which several gigawatts of new load may or may not show up goes to the Board without a stakeholder endorsement.

The queue those classifications sort is 474 GW, roughly 90 percent of it data centers, per the ERCOT queue figures cited in the Governor's August 3 audit directive. The Batch Zero process was designed to bring order to that number. What it has produced so far is a list, delivered late, of who is allowed to keep waiting.

"Nowhere in the Plain Language of the Statute Are 765KV Lines Mentioned"

Last Friday's open meeting was underway at press time. Here is how it ended: after hours of landowner testimony, the five-member Commission voted unanimously to amend Oncor's certificates for Dinosaur Switch–Longshore Switch (Docket 59315) and Longshore Switch–Drill Hole Switch (Docket 59029) — Import Path 1 of the Permian Basin Reliability Plan, more than 400 miles of the first 765-kV transmission ever approved in Texas, running from Somervell County west to the Permian. Oncor is targeting 2028 for the eastern segment and 2029 for the western one. The AEP Texas and CPS Energy Howard–Solstice line, Docket 59336, was tabled for further deliberation.

The Commission approved the lines the same morning the Attorney General asked it not to. Ken Paxton's amicus brief, filed early Friday in support of American Stewards of Liberty's motion to defer a determination of need, argues that HB 5066 "mandate[s] the Commission to develop a reliability plan to implement, but nowhere in the plain language of the statute are 765KV lines mentioned." That is the state's chief legal officer — and the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate — taking the landowners' side against Oncor, AEP Texas and CPS on a plan the Commission adopted two years ago. ASL says it will seek rehearing and prepare for court. Sen. Kevin Sparks of Midland, whose district gets the power, issued a statement urging the Commission to reserve decisions on the remaining 765-kV dockets until the 90th Legislature convenes in January, and pointed to the SOAH recommendation I covered last week that found Oncor had not proven need on Import Path 2.

The strongest argument for the lines came from the oil patch, not the utility. Diamondback Energy's lobbyist told commissioners the company self-generates about 80 MW and pulls 330 MW from the grid, with a current interconnection wait of more than two years. The strongest argument against them is no longer about landowners; it is about arithmetic. An Evolved Energy Research study published Monday, produced with ClearPath, modeled roughly 5,000 buses and 7,000 lines in ERCOT and found that $10 billion of reconductoring avoids $30 billion of greenfield build in a high-load scenario through 2040 — and that $35 billion of greenfield is still needed on top of it. Two weeks ago I argued that if Texas is going to build wire, it should build 765. The study does not disagree. It says build less of it, later, and restring what you have first. Somebody in Docket 59029 is going to cite it by Thanksgiving.

$35 Billion, 350 Megawatts, Three Balance Sheets, One Interconnection Agreement

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday night that Anthropic signed a roughly $35 billion cloud capacity agreement with Lambda, the Nvidia-backed neocloud, with Nvidia itself holding the lease on the data center. Reuters put the capacity at about 350 MW and the site in Nueces County. There is one 350 MW data hall in Nueces County with a lease that size: Hut 8's Beacon Point campus outside Robstown, where the company disclosed in July a second 15-year, 352 MW lease that took a single unnamed tenant to 704 MW and $19.6 billion of base-term contract value. Hut 8 has not confirmed the tenant, and none of the four companies answered Reuters. Treat the identification as reported, not admitted.

Follow the stack. Hut 8 owns 525 acres and holds a 1,000 MW interconnection agreement with AEP Texas. Nvidia, per the reporting, holds the lease. Lambda installs Nvidia's chips inside Nvidia's lease. Anthropic buys the output. The chipmaker is the landlord's tenant, the tenant's supplier, and the end customer's financier, and the whole structure sits on a bitcoin miner's interconnection agreement for which formal ERCOT energization authorization is still outstanding. Initial energization is scheduled for Q1 2027. See the section above regarding approvals for loads over 75 MW.

This is Anthropic's second reported gigawatt-scale landing on a Texas miner in three weeks. On August 11, Riot announced a 20-year, 191 MW lease at Rockdale with a "leading frontier AI lab" worth about $9.1 billion over the base term; CNBC and Bloomberg named the lab. Miners spent 2024 telling investors they were pivoting to AI. The pivot, it turns out, was mostly a matter of waiting for the customer to arrive with a bigger balance sheet than the miner's.

$500,000 an Acre, Because the Substation Is Already There

On Tuesday, Bitdeer closed on about 200 acres of greenfield in Milam County, near its Rockdale mining site, for roughly $100 million in cash, fee simple. That takes Bitdeer to about 255 acres with 563 MW of interconnected capacity and a plan to reach 742 MW. Riot paid $96 million for its own 200 acres at Rockdale in January, funded by selling about 1,080 bitcoin, and has since put 241 MW of it under contract. Two miners, 400 acres, $196 million, a few miles apart, in a county of 25,000 people. The land is not worth $500,000 an acre. The existing large-load interconnection and the substation next to it are, and Bitdeer's release says as much: the site "positions the Company to pursue additional power allocations over the coming years." KBW kept the stock at Market Perform, noted the price came in under its $131 million estimate, and asked the questions that matter — whether the seller's interconnection and water rights transferred with the dirt, and who exactly owns the aging Rockdale substation.

The third Milam County play went to the SEC. SB Energy, SoftBank's power-and-data-center developer, filed an S-1 dated August 31 to list on Nasdaq and Nasdaq Texas under the ticker SBE, with Nvidia committing $1.5 billion in a concurrent private placement and another $1.5 billion through a prepaid forward. The backlog is $439 billion, $430 billion of it data centers, resting on two Texas campuses — Stargate Milam County for OpenAI, and Cosmos in Austin for SoftBank itself — and one sentence on page one that every underwriter will have to read aloud: "No data center capacity is currently in operation." Trailing twelve-month revenue is about $269 million. The trailing twelve-month net loss is about $3.7 billion, most of it a $2.57 billion warrant fair-value charge in the first half. Press reports put the raise at $5 billion to $7 billion, per Latitude Media. Milam County now hosts three separate gigawatt-class AI power plays — Riot, Bitdeer, SB Energy — on one ERCOT load pocket that is itself waiting on the list ERCOT delivered Thursday.

2.5 GW of Pipe, Zero Named Sites

Cipher Digital's answer to Batch Zero arrived Thursday morning: the company has begun building natural gas lateral pipelines at multiple undisclosed sites capable of fueling up to 2.5 GW of on-site generation, with power targeted before the end of 2027. Cipher will "work with power providers to develop and operate" the plants, and its CEO says the company plans to seek grid connection for the generation capacity as well — bring your own generation now, sell into ERCOT later. The 2.5 GW is what the pipe can carry, not what is built, contracted or leased. Per Blockspace, Cipher is carrying roughly 2 GW gross across McLennan, Mikeska and Colchis awaiting Batch Zero, plus a 900 MW option near San Antonio, none with a firm interconnection date. Two weeks ago its Cotulla project ran into the audit. This week it ordered pipe.

Bring-your-own-generation has its own bottleneck, and it got tighter on August 26 when the White House signed Executive Order 14420, declaring a national emergency over the bulk-power system and restricting equipment from 24 countries at 69 kV and above, with DOE rules due within 120 days. Wood Mackenzie's read, published Wednesday in pv magazine: Chinese manufacturers have supplied more than $22 billion of U.S. bulk-power imports since the start of 2025, the domestic shortage this year runs about 15 percent for power transformers and 8 percent for substations, and the segment that leaned hardest on Chinese units to shave lead times is the 100 MVA-plus class that data centers buy. Every behind-the-meter campus in Texas still needs a step-up transformer. The order did not create the shortage. It just decided who is not allowed to fix it.

What to Watch Next Week

The dispute clock. Utilities have two business days from Thursday's notice to pass classifications to their loads, and base-to-studied reclassifications can be disputed under Section 9.3.1. Expect the first dispute forms, and the first press releases from developers who did not get the classification they wanted, by mid-week.

Project 58481, the large-load interconnection rule. Staff targeted a recommended adoption order for the §25.194 rule — the $50,000-per-MW security, the 80/20 refundability split — this week, with the Commission taking it up at the September 11 open meeting. Howard–Solstice and any ASL rehearing motion on Docket 59029 could land on the same agenda.

ERCOT Board, September 14–15. The 2027 Ancillary Services methodology arrives without a TAC endorsement. Watch whether the Board adopts ERCOT's higher risk-credit parameter for ECRS and Non-Spin anyway.

Large Load Working Group, September 17. The agenda is voltage ride-through solutions currently available — the technical question behind the dynamic-model cure that a slice of Batch Zero is now subject to.

Hut 8 and Lambda. Hut 8 has not named its 704 MW tenant. Lambda is reportedly raising up to $3 billion ahead of an IPO. One of them will say something.

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.