[TX Gov.] Abbott Orders Comprehensive Data Center Audit Amid Surge in Texas Grid Requests

Gov. Greg Abbott has ordered state regulators to conduct a comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through the interconnection process before any additional projects are approved. Abbott said projects that fail to comply with state requirements, or with state law, must be denied connection to the Texas grid.

The Monday letter, addressed to the leaders of the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), cited “the failure of some data centers to comply with the PUC’s survey measuring water and power usage” as a reason for the new order.

“[ERCOT] is currently considering approximately 474 gigawatts of requests to connect to the Texas grid. That is more than five times Texas’ record peak electricity demand for ERCOT. Approximately 90 percent of the new power requests are data centers,” noted Abbott.

PUCT and ERCOT must also obtain additional information about each project, including the extent to which data centers are paying for themselves, providing their own power, utilizing their own water, and reducing impacts on neighboring properties.

The audit order comes after Abbott sent a letter in June directing the PUCT and ERCOT to “ensure everyday Texans are not burdened with the costs of infrastructure driven by data center expansion, and … residential electric bills are not negatively affected.”

In the same letter, Abbott also pledged to work with the Texas Legislature to ensure data centers’ power, water, and financial stresses—as well as “impacts on local communities”—are reduced for Texas residents.

Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian “applauded” Abbott’s order for an audit, stating that “no data center project should come at the expense of grid reliability or Texas’ natural resources.”

“We need a Texas plan for data centers, and that starts with getting the facts straight. We cannot manage what we have not measured,” stated Christian. “The information gathered through this process will give regulators and policymakers the tools they need to develop a Texas plan that keeps our state at the forefront of technological innovation while ensuring growth, accountability, and transparency.”

Texas has previously been ranked second in the nation for data center inventory. Recent polling has indicated that Texans oppose the construction of a data center in their community.

Abbott, who once championed the state as the “epicenter of AI development,” has recently called for reevaluating where data center projects are placed.

In other words, 474GW would be enough to power 356 million households!

Gov. Abbott appears to be putting a hold only on permits for data centers being connected to the grid. The hold doesn't appear to apply to data centers providing their own electricity and not connected to the grid.

Why don’t they put these on the great lakes with winter cold and cold fresh water?

Good idea. You and I think alike.

I say build the data centers in north-central Alaska. They can cool it during the winter by blowing free cold air through the data center. Thus, the hard cooling demand is only in the summer.

And it's during the summer they can have free solar power almost all day. So their onsite power generation can be a hybrid of solar and hydrocarbon (i.e. natural gas fueled power plant). As long as the hydrocarbon plant is scalable (can turn up and down efficiently) then during the summer on sunny days their power plant has to run for only a small part of the day (the few dark hours of the night). That's pretty much how my decentralized solar for my home saves me money. In Alabama, the highest demand for power is on hot sunny days because that's when we run our A/C a lot. However, that's also when I get a lot of free solar power. Thus, the solar isn't enough to go off grid because I don't have enough solar and battery storage to power the home for multiple days in a row of rain. But those rainy days are days I don't use much power anyway (because rainy/cloudy days usually means mild temperature days), so I don't wind up pulling much power from the grid.

It seems to me that a data center in Alaska utilizing free cold air in the winter doesn't have to consume as much power in the winter as in the summer. In the summer is when it'd have to pump water for cooling -- I imagine a much more power intensive process than just blowing cold air in from outside. But it's in the summer that daylight in Alaska lasts a really long time -- good for solar power. By utilizing the free cold air in the winter (and thus not need much power, even though it's dark a long time in the winter and there's no free solar power), and utilizing free solar power in the summer, when they get lots of solar hours to offset the extra power consumption of pumping water for cooling -- their onsite hydrocarbon power station wouldn't have to work nearly as much as building data centers in much of the rest of the U.S.

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