Texas froze 474 GW of AI power requests; the batteries on its garage walls never joined the queue
ERCOT's large-load queue is five times the state's record peak demand, and switch-ons are frozen until a December audit. The squeeze pays whoever can serve peak power without an interconnection request: Base Power, marked at $13 billion in August, installs about a hundred home batteries a day.
Vincent Jiang · 3 min read
Seventeen campuses are waiting at a locked door
Seventeen large data centers have cleared every gate ERCOT has, stability studies included, and were due online this year totaling 6.6 GW of peak demand 1. The last gate, permission to energize, is shut. Governor Greg Abbott ordered an audit of every large load on August 3; ERCOT aims to finish by December 10 1. On September 21, with November's reelection looming, he widened it to every state permit a data center might need 2.
A queue five times the grid's record
Interconnection requests to ERCOT total about 474 GW, roughly 90% of it data centers, against a record peak hour of 87,533 MW set on July 21 13. At the end of 2024 the queue stood at 63 GW 4. Experts call a substantial portion of the rest speculative or duplicated 1.
The AI queue is now five times the grid's record peak
Data
| Value | |
|---|---|
| Queue, Dec 2024 | 63GW |
| Record peak hour, Jul 2026 | 87.5GW |
| Queue, Jun 2026 | 474GW |
What waiting costs, and what escaping costs
Waiting now has a price schedule. Rules the Public Utility Commission of Texas finalized on September 18 5 and made effective October 8 4 charge loads of 75 MW and up a flat $100,000 study fee plus $50,000 per MW of requested capacity in security. A project that withdraws after capacity is allocated forfeits 20% of it 5. Fully connecting a large data center takes five to ten years 4.
Escaping costs more than it looks. Holding one 1 GW campus through a single 14-hour winter night takes 14 GWh of batteries, about half of ERCOT's entire fleet as of June 4. xAI's$200B — xAI, private, latest valuation $200B Memphis campus needed 150 MW of Tesla−0.82% — Tesla, down 0.82 percent today Megapacks just to absorb its own load swings 4. The islands are caught too: the September 21 order was written to reach projects that generate their own power 25.
The fleet that never filed
Base Power$200M — Base Power, private, latest valuation $200M puts batteries in homes, charges them overnight and sells the stored power back when the grid is tight, on wires that already exist. On August 3, the day Abbott ordered his audit, it raised $1 billion at a $13 billion valuation, $2.5 billion in total, with utility partnerships covering more than 200 MW 61. The shared date is timing, not cause.
It installs about 100 batteries a day 7 and says it powers more than 30,000 homes 8. One fleet, run with the co-op GVEC, passed ERCOT's wholesale pilot and is expanding to 50 MW 4. The squeeze's loudest brief comes from a16z, an investor in the round whose jobs newsletter recruits for the company 78.
The rival is named: Tesla. Texans can lease 27 kWh of Powerwalls for $35 a month, or 39.2 kWh of Base batteries for $19, a price Tesla cut by more than two-thirds in response 9. Tesla has more than 6.7 GW of Powerwalls installed; Base adds 8 MWh a day and wants to double that by year end 9.
December decides
Abbott's side is not nothing: after as few as 28% of data centers answered a state water survey, he wrote that "Texans must come first" 2. If the December 10 report clears credible projects, Batch Zero resumes, already sure to miss its April 9, 2027, deadline 1. The tell is whether planners credit flexibility, batteries included, when sizing upgrades; today they size for a campus's full planned load 4.
The scarce thing in Texas is no longer electricity. It is permission to use it.
Deepdive
AI-generated from this story and its cited sources. Not investment advice.
