Data Centers and Texas Communities
Water, noise, tax abatements, moratoriums and local control: what Texas counties and cities are doing about large loads, and what a developer owes the town it builds in. 25 articles from The Grid Report, newest first.
- "Very, Very Intrusive": 461 Surveys, 231 Notaries, and a Board That Voted Itself a 30% Raise
Last week I said the Batch Zero scoreboard was self-reported and that ERCOT had published nothing. On September 11, two days before that issue went out, ERCOT filed the aggregate in Project 59142, and the numbers...
- Nobody Disclosed a Square Foot
Four sub-75 MW deals closed or cleared in the past seven days. Between them: 29 acres in Texas, three acres and a building in Arkansas, forty-one acres of a decommissioned Kodak campus in Colorado, and twenty acres...
- ERCOT Sorted the Queue and Published Nothing, So the Market Built Its Own Scoreboard
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...
- $161 a Kilowatt-Month in Tulsa, 333 Watts a Foot in Dowagiac: The Middle Market Prices Live Power
Nobody in the sub-75 MW market bought dirt this week. They bought meters. A Tulsa business park with 43 MW already landed signed a 15-year take-or-pay worth $1.25 billion. A Michigan bitcoin barn switched off its...
- Around the Queue, Not Through It: $35 Billion in Nueces County, 400 Miles of 765 kV, and a Batch Zero List Three Days Late
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...
- "The Only Meaningful Remedy Remaining": Three Judges Recommend Killing the Line, and ERCOT Concedes April Is Gone
Thursday, August 20 was a busy day in Austin. At 1:52 in the afternoon, three administrative law judges filed a Proposal for Decision recommending that the Public Utility Commission deny Oncor and LCRA Transmission...
- Buy at $4.2M a Megawatt, Build at $5.9M, Rent at $1.5M a Year
Five transactions printed this week, and for once none of them needed a gigawatt to be interesting. A private equity platform bought ten metro boxes at $4.25 million a megawatt. Eleven banks committed $800 million...
- Eighty-Two Dollars a Foot in Oakland, Thirteen Sixty-Seven in Bristow
Six data center buildings changed hands or got entitled in the lower 48 in the last seven days, and every one of them is small — 3 MW to 55 MW, the band this newsletter exists to cover. Put their trade prices on...
- Twenty Megawatts: Now a Zoning Trigger, Still a Financing Orphan
Two things happened this week at opposite ends of the market, and neither one was good news if you build in the middle. Tucson set its data center permitting trigger at 20 MW or 25,000 square feet. The Town of...
- Demand First, Dirt Second: A 40 MW Pre-Lease, $50M/GW Deposit Math, and the ABS Window Reopens
The week's tape reads like the market decided dirt is the easy part. The deals that actually closed between July 28 and August 4 were contracts and credit structures — a 40 MW campus 100% pre-leased before it's...
- The Comp Is $1.76M per MW-Year. The Constraint Is Permission.
The week priced both ends of this market at once. At the top, AMD put chipmaker credit behind 529 MW of 15-year leases on converted mining campuses — call it $1.76M per MW-year, and every mid-size take-or-pay in a...
- The Edge Premium Prints at 20%: A 10 MW Deal in Columbus Just Priced the Curve
The most useful number this week is one of the smallest. Duos Edge AI signed an investment-grade hyperscaler to a five-year, 10 MW colocation agreement in Columbus, Georgia worth $111 million — about $2.22 million...
- 32 Plants, 287 Million Tons: Somebody Finally Added Up the Texas Gas Buildout
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...
- Power First, Tenant Later
Three deals defined this week, and they rhyme in a way that should make anyone underwriting mid-market inference pay attention: the power got secured before the tenant did. A Bitcoin miner in southwest Michigan is...
- "Add to Capacity, Not Just Demand": Texas Starts Billing the Data Centers
For three years the only question that mattered in Texas energy was how fast you could build. This week the question changed. On June 10, Governor Abbott told the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT, in writing,...
- Buying Around the Queue: A Lexington Brownfield, a Cedar City Gas Plant, and Amazon Sets the 6% Comp
Five deals closed or cleared this week, in five different states, and not one of them was really about money. Capital is everywhere right now. What these sponsors actually bought was a way around the grid...
- 438 Gigawatts, and Who Gets to Say No
ERCOT spent this week doing two things at once that do not obviously fit together. On Tuesday it told everyone the grid will sail through a record summer. On Monday and Tuesday its board voted to ration access to...
- The Week the Grid Said No: 900 MW Dead, a Year-Long Freeze, and a $14.5M Exit
Some weeks the news is what got built. This week the news is what got killed. A 900 MW campus in Hanover County died on a 4-3 vote. Central Arkansas froze new data centers for a year. A 2.6 million-square-foot...
- 238 Gigawatts on Paper, $100 Million in Federal Court
ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue closed May at roughly 238,000 megawatts, north of 70 percent of it data centers. On Wednesday, a developer in Hill County took $80 million of land, 1,235 megawatts of...
- The Anchor Tenant Is the Underwrite: Four Deals, One Pattern
Four deals closed or got entitled in the past week and they read like the same memo. A $7.5 billion lease that won't tell you what state the building is in. A $225 million portfolio sale at $4.25 a watt that turns...
- Three Charts for the Data-Center Conversation You're About to Have
The three things people most commonly get wrong about data centers — that they raise residential electric rates, that they drain local water supplies, and that they get built next to schools — are all, on the...
- "We Don't Want It in Our Community": Texas Starts Pushing Back
For three years the Texas data center story has been a one-way ratchet: more megawatts requested, more campuses announced, more capital committed, and a grid operator that kept raising its own forecast. This week...
- The Bill Comes Due: Texas Lawmakers Target $1 Billion in Data Center Tax Breaks as New Megaprojects Break Ground
Every week I sit here and tell you about the capital pouring into Texas energy infrastructure. Billions here, gigawatts there. This week is no different — Aligned Data Centers just broke ground on a 540 MW campus...
- "Texas Has a Hyperscale Problem": Why Communities Are Turning on Big Tech Data Centers
Texas communities are done being polite about hyperscale data centers. And frankly, they've earned the right to be angry.
- The Boom Hits a Wall: Stargate Retreats, Amazon Goes Nuclear, and Miners Sell Everything
The AI infrastructure boom just hit its first real speed bump — and it happened in Texas.
Barrio Energy develops powered sites in Texas and publishes the Barrio Grid map and API the reporting above draws on. Questions from communities: see Community.