On September 3 at 3:55 in the afternoon, ERCOT sent Market Notice M-A080326-04 to transmission and distribution service providers, telling them which large loads had been conditionally included in Batch Zero. It did not tell the loads. It did not tell the public. There is no list on ercot.com, no spreadsheet, no press release, no total.

So the market did what markets do when the referee will not post the score. Over the following week, eight publicly traded sponsors announced their own results, one at a time, through press releases and 8-Ks and in one case a tweet. By Thursday a trade publication had assembled those disclosures into the only aggregate scoreboard that exists in Texas. The chart's own footer credits its methodology: "Source: Company press releases, public disclosures | Generated with Chat GPT." Its lead line item is off by 23 megawatts.

The Scoreboard Is Self-Reported, and Nobody Reported a Loss

Start with what is actually documented. IREN said on September 8 that its 2 GW Sweetwater hub was conditionally included as Base Load — Sweetwater 1 at 1,400 MW and Sweetwater 2 at 600 MW. Soluna said ERCOT conditionally classified the full 166 MW Kati campus in Willacy County as Base Load, including the planned Kati 2 expansion. Ionic Digital said TNMP had informed it that ERCOT provisionally classified its remaining 466 MW at Ward County as Base Load, which would take that campus to 700 MW aggregate. Cipher Digital said it had received classifications covering 3.2 GW and declined to say how much of that was base load, how much was studied load, or which sites were involved.

Every one of those is a good result. That is the problem. Eight companies spoke and eight companies cleared. Not one press release this week said a project was excluded, and not one disclosed a dispute filing. ERCOT built a remedy path into the September 3 notice specifically for loads that were submitted as base load and came back reclassified as studied load — Planning Guide Section 9.3.1(2)(a) — which is not the sort of provision a grid operator drafts for a hypothetical. Somebody got moved. Nobody has said so.

The denominator does not arrive until December 10, when ERCOT files its Batch Zero Eligibility Verification Report, followed by a Commission open meeting on December 17. Until then, the sample is every company with listed equity and a favorable outcome. Underwrite accordingly.

"1,402 MW" Is Not 1,402 MW of Batch Zero

Core Scientific filed the cleanest document of the week and it rewards reading past the headline number. The September 10 8-K reports conditional approvals across three Texas sites totaling 1,402 MW. Of that, 371 MW is not in Batch Zero at all: 297 MW at Denton is classified base load under Pathway (a) as longstanding existing load because it energized before March 25, 2022, and another 74 MW was already validated through ERCOT's 2025 Regional Transmission Plan. The filing says both plainly — neither portion is subject to the Batch Zero allocation process.

What is actually in the batch is 1,031 MW: 431 MW at Hunt County as base load under the advancing-large-load pathway, and 600 MW at Pecos split evenly, 300 MW base load and 300 MW studied load. Studied load is not a rejection and it is not an approval. It means the project stays in the allocation queue and may receive less than it asked for, with final results expected in spring 2027. Core Scientific is targeting roughly 1.5 GW gross at Pecos and intends to cover the difference with generation behind the meter.

The 23-megawatt error in the aggregate scoreboard is Denton, listed at 274 MW where the 8-K says 297 MW. It is a small number and it does not change anyone's thesis. It is worth naming anyway, because it is the tell: the only public tally of the largest load-sorting exercise in ERCOT history was assembled from press releases by a trade outlet doing work the grid operator declined to do, and it has already drifted from the filings. That is not a criticism of the outlet. It is a description of the information environment.

Ten Business Days and a Notary

Six days after the classifications went out, ERCOT started taking them back. Market Notice M-A090926-01, issued September 9, began the verification requests for information that trace back to Governor Abbott's August 3 directive. Responses go through RIOO within 10 business days, with an extension of no more than five, and they require notarized attestations from three parties: the load entity, the interconnecting transmission service provider, and the interconnecting distribution service provider.

The penalty language is not hedged. Failure to timely provide a complete response, ERCOT wrote, "will result in the Large Load being excluded from ERCOT's Batch Zero interconnection process." A separate RFI covering state and community impacts is still to come.

Consider what a notarized attestation from three parties actually requires. The developer has to certify facts about a project. The utility has to certify the same facts. Both have to find a notary and a signatory with authority, twice, inside two weeks, in September. ERCOT already has a read on how this market handles technical paperwork: in its August 20 filing to the commissioners, the grid operator reported reviewing 290 dynamic models, of which "approximately 18% were acceptable on first review." The first RFI responses come due around September 23. Watch for the first company to disclose a miss, because on this schedule somebody will.

The Chairman Said "Remand," and Then the Record Went Quiet

Two of the largest pending questions in Texas power were on the Commission's September 11 agenda, and as of this writing neither has produced a signed order.

The first is 765 kV. On September 9, Chairman Thomas Gleeson filed a memorandum in Docket 59475 — the Oncor and LCRA TSC line from Bell County East Switch to Big Hill, the one where the administrative law judges recommended denial. He did not act on the recommendation. He proposed sending it back: "At this time, I believe it is premature to address whether the recommendations in the PFD should be acted on. Instead, for the reasons outlined below, I believe we need to remand this proceeding to SOAH for further processing." His grounds are procedural rather than substantive — the proposal for decision did not address two of the preliminary order issues, including whether the facilities are necessary to meet reliability standards. Oral argument was cancelled the same day. An intervenor filed a response on September 10 captioned as a response to the Chairman's memorandum proposing remand, so the parties understood the posture.

Proposed is not ordered. A chairman's memo is a signal, not a disposition, and remand, abatement, denial and postponement are four different things with four different consequences for a developer's schedule. I have watched this Commission get all four described interchangeably in the same week. As of today the docket shows no order.

The second is Agenda Item 24: Project 58481, the large-load interconnection rulemaking under PURA 37.0561, which came to the meeting as a staff-recommended order adopting new 16 TAC §25.194. The draft puts a price on a place in line — $50,000 per megawatt in financial security before a load is included in an ERCOT study, returned in 20% increments as the project energizes, with 20% forfeited for withdrawing after allocation. The separate interconnection fee that appeared in the March proposal was removed. The last filing in the project is dated September 10. There is no adopted order on file.

So: the rule that prices the queue and the docket that decides whether the Permian gets its first 765 kV line both went to a Friday open meeting, and the public record shows nothing came out. That may resolve on Monday. It may not. Either way, anyone modeling a Texas interconnection this quarter is working from an agenda item rather than a rule.

Three Balance Sheets That Stopped Waiting

While the queue sorted itself, other people bought their way around it.

SoftBank's SB Energy filed an S-1 on September 1 to list on Nasdaq under the symbol SBE, disclosing 8,827 MW-IT of contracted data center capacity. Two Milam County projects — 308 MW-IT and 445 MW-IT, both targeted for 2028, both under construction — name OpenAI as the customer. A Travis County campus at 50 MW-IT is leased triple-net for fifteen years to a SoftBank affiliate. The prospectus also contains the most useful sentence any Texas power buyer will read this month: "No data center capacity is currently in operation." The widely quoted $439 billion backlog is cumulative undiscounted contracted cash across lease lives averaging nearly twenty years, most of it in Ohio, and the filing itself calls it a hypothetical estimate. Treat it as a term-length disclosure, not a revenue figure.

Fluidstack broke ground the same week on roughly 1,100 acres in unincorporated Cameron County near Rio Hondo, a $4 billion first phase with no tax abatements and no county incentives. Head of public affairs Kate Franko: "We pay our own way: our energy, our infrastructure, our water, and full local property taxes, and we build to the Governor's standards from day one." No megawatt figure has been disclosed for the site, which in a week defined by megawatt disclosures is itself the interesting fact.

And Net Power closed on ten Wärtsilä engine-generator sets, about 123 MW, taking phase one of Project Permian to nearly 200 MW. The EPC contract runs to $196,711,035.70, and the same filing states the company has not entered into a power purchase agreement for the facility's output and has not made a final investment decision. Chief executive Daniel Rice: "In eighteen days, we identified this equipment, secured it with appropriate protections, and closed the transaction." Eighteen days to buy 123 MW of engines. Batch Zero results land in April 2027.

What to Watch Next Week

Cipher's site-level split. The company said it would provide details during the week of September 14. Rosenblatt has already guessed at the allocation — Colchis at 1,000 MW, four sites at 500 MW, Stingray expansion at 200 MW — and kept a $30 target against a $16.90 share price. Cipher has confirmed none of it. 3.2 GW with no tier breakdown is the largest undefined number in Texas power right now.

Two orders that should have issued. Watch Project 58481 for the signed §25.194 adoption order, and Dockets 59475 and 59182 for whatever the Commission actually does with the ALJs' denial recommendations. Docket 59336 drew its own joint memorandum from Gleeson and Commissioner Hjaltman on September 10.

The first RFI failure. Notarized attestations from three parties, ten business days, exclusion as the penalty. The earliest responses come due around September 23.

ERCOT's calendar. The board meets September 14 and 15, the first time since classifications went out. The Large Load Working Group meets September 17, which is where the implementation detail gets argued rather than announced. An October 6 workshop takes up the SB 6 large-load curtailment framework.

A number to stop misquoting. ERCOT's all-time peak demand record stands at 91,134 MW, set July 22, 2026, and it is still preliminary pending final settlement. The 91,308 MW figure in circulation is a real-time instantaneous reading. ERCOT's own methodology note is unambiguous: "ERCOT does not count instantaneous loads for demand records."

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.