Wednesday, September 23, 2026 |
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The Last Page.
The last page, first.
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Texas Halted New Data Center Permits on Monday
The state that sold itself on cheap power just paused new permits. The industry wants the regulators moving again.
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The story
Texas stopped issuing new environmental permits to data-center developers on Monday. Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to pause them. They stay paused until ERCOT finishes auditing the projects seeking grid access.
He put conditions on the industry as well. Data centers must pay their own way and protect the grid and local water. Households, he has said, should not carry their infrastructure costs.
The industry wants speed, and Dan Diorio of the Data Center Coalition asked the state to move swiftly. Billions are invested and hundreds of thousands of jobs are on the line, he said.
Other states are already doing the same arithmetic. Data Center Watch counted 45 American projects worth $68 billion blocked or delayed between April and June.
Your power bill is the other end of this argument.
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474 GW
Requests waiting for a grid connection, about nine in ten of them data centers.
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91 GW
The grid’s record peak, set on July 22 this year.
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22.5%
Share of the 267 data centers new to the state’s water survey that answered.
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The queue
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The line a project stands in to get connected to the grid. A request is not a promise that the project will be built.
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Best case
JUNE 2027. The state finished on schedule, and the list came back a fraction of what had been filed. Most of it turned out to be paperwork.
The projects that survived brought their own generation and their own water, so Texas issued their permits in the spring. Their turbines went in on land nobody was using.
The July rules held, so the wires went on the industry’s bill. Your rate stopped climbing for the first time in six years. August read lower than the August before it.
The towns that had fought the projects stopped fighting them. A water permit became something a developer could actually get.
The buildout Texas ended up with was smaller than the one it was promised. Every megawatt of it had somewhere to come from.
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Worst case
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MARCH 2027. The audit ran on without a number. The review asked for more time and the developers stopped waiting for it. Two audits had turned into four.
Two of the big projects moved to Louisiana, and one died in a county commission meeting in February. The jobs in the announcements never showed up on a payroll.
The wires got built anyway, because ERCOT approved the transmission when the queue still read 474 gigawatts. Transmission gets paid for whether the load shows up or not.
The legislature took the tax breaks away in the spring session, which settled it for the ones still deciding.
That cost sits in the rate base, which is where your bill comes from. Yours went up again in January. The data center that was going to pay for it is a field with a fence around it.
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How it ends
You get most of that queue falling out when the audit reports, unless the review lets the announcements count.
The queue is the story. Standing in it costs almost nothing, so it fills with projects that may never be financed. The grid operator warned in May that its own forecast might be inflated by speculative filings.
The water survey is the tell. Texas added 267 data centers to it last year, and fewer than a quarter wrote back. Abbott told the water board last week to start fining the ones that skip it.
Now run it the other way. The wires are the part that is already real. ERCOT plans transmission off the queue, and that cost lands in the rate base even when the buildings never arrive.
The same buildout is arriving on grids across the country. The Energy Information Administration put a number on it this year. Data centers and crypto mining take two thirds of the growth in US electricity sales.
Abbott also wants the legislature to take the tax breaks away. The state that paid companies to come is thinking about charging them to stay.
We ran it both ways. Texas is six weeks from an election and its voters have opened their power bills. The industry gets its permits back, and it gets them on terms written by people who just read those bills.
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ERCOT is auditing the queue. It stood at 474 gigawatts when the review began, against a record peak of just over 91. Watch what number comes back, and when.
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