Facing 474 GW of interconnection requests, Texas hits pause on data centers
utilitydive.comTexas has already begun to evolve around the need for interconnections. If you have the ability to construct the datacenter and power plant directly on top of the energy source, you can eliminate a lot of the delivery risk.
https://www.chevron.com/newsroom/2026/q2/chevron-signs-20-ye...
The transmission of energy is very expensive. Transmission of information is effectively free by comparison.
Supposedly, there is a long waiting line of people willing to build power plants and lines. What's going on in the nation's fossil fuel powerhouse? Don't they care about the shareholders?
It's more that Texas is barely able to operate their grid at 100% of today's capacity demands without noteworthy outages and humiliating 100x/kwH surge pricing events, prior to datacenters requesting another 500% of the capacity they're unable to deliver competently today. And it's not like they can just build five more racks in a datacenter to solve that! One wonders if Texas will pass a bill like Oregon that charges datacenters for the capital infrastructure build costs (new generation plants, new transmission lines, etc.) of their demand — corporate graft as a state ethos is all well and good until you're evaluating Datacenters Per Nuclear Power Plant in serious, rather than comedic, terms.
Have any links to this? I'm not super familiar with Texas's generation or grid.
ERCOT operates most of Texas’ grid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Reliability_Council_o...