Electric Reliability Council of Texas, Inc.

Texas has ordered PUCT and ERCOT to audit every data-centre project advancing through the grid connection process before it can move forward. The state says requests now exceed 474GW—more than five times ERCOT’s record peak demand—and that roughly 90% of new power requests come from data centres. Those figures describe a queue, not future consumption. The practical change is that a project must now make its power, water, subsidy and ownership claims comparable before scarce grid capacity is allocated.

Texas is developing rules that would make large data-centre projects bear more of their grid-connection costs before operations begin.

Winter Storm Uri was not a contest in which one fuel source failed and another passed. It was a common-mode failure across generation, natural-gas production and delivery, demand forecasting, critical-load mapping, market settlement, emergency communication and public infrastructure. ERCOT operators prevented an uncontrolled grid collapse by ordering unprecedented load shedding, but millions of people then carried the consequences of assets and institutions that had not converted earlier winter warnings into enforceable, coordinated readiness. The durable accountability question is therefore not whether Texas has since completed inspections or survived later cold fronts. It is whether every owner of a critical control can prove that weatherization, fuel assurance, system planning, outage rotation, consumer protection and recovery finance will work together under a severe, long-duration event rather than only under the conditions most recently experienced.