Data centers accounted for 420,812 MW of the large loads asking to connect to the Texas grid as of June 2026, or 90.2% of about 474 GW, according to an ERCOT presentation to the Texas Senate on 29 July. That is 4.6 times the grid’s record peak demand of 91,134 MW, set on 22 July, by our arithmetic.
Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa has said she will freeze electricity rates, and her campaign page ties the freeze to data centers paying for themselves. Texas sets the parts of a power bill in different places: a wholesale market, regulated delivery rates and retail prices that the regulator does not set. Her statements do not say which parts the order would cover.
Business Pill · Who Pays for the Grid
A short explainer on who pays for grid upgrades. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss Texas or the freeze plan.
The key insight: Data centers asked to connect 420,812 MW to the ERCOT grid as of June 2026, 90.2% of about 474 GW of large-load requests, ERCOT told the Texas Senate; that is 4.6 times the 91,134 MW record peak, by our arithmetic. The PUCT says it does not set the final price charged by retail electric providers, while it regulates delivery rates and caps wholesale offers.
ERCOT’s 29 July deck says: “ERCOT is tracking approximately 474 GW of Large Loads seeking interconnection, of which ~90% are data centers”. In the same table, crypto mining is 3.0%, industrial loads 1.0% and hydrogen 0.8%. Loads of 75 MW or more count as large loads.
The deck lists 5.9 GW of large loads observed energized in 2026. Its table projects the requests year by year through 2033. On 3 August Governor Greg Abbott wrote that the requests are “more than five times Texas’ record peak electricity demand for ERCOT” and that “Approximately 90 percent of the new power requests are data centers”.
His letter ordered the PUCT and ERCOT to run “a comprehensive verification and audit of all data centers advancing through ERCOT’s interconnection process”. ERCOT’s September Batch Zero update says it has “paused the energization of new Large Load data centers and crypto mining facilities” until that audit ends, with a report to the commission due by 10 December. Its study conditionally kept 194.3 GW of large loads, as we reported; that deck does not split the figure by load type.
Data-center requests to connect to ERCOT (June 2026) against the preliminary 2032 forecast, the 91,134 MW record peak of 22 July 2026 (unofficial) and large loads energized in 2026. Source: ERCOT Senate deck 29 July 2026, CEO Update September 2026, release 15 April 2026. The 4.6x ratio is our arithmetic.
What the Forecast Says
ERCOT’s preliminary long-term forecast of 15 April projects “approximately 367,790 MW of demand in the ERCOT Region by 2032”. The data-center requests alone are larger than that whole-region figure, by our arithmetic. ERCOT chief executive Pablo Vegas said: “we believe this forecast to be higher than expected future load growth”.
ERCOT calls the forecast a snapshot that “is not a prediction of what will be built”. In May it asked the PUCT for permission “to not perform the May 2026 Report on Capacity, Demand, and Reserves in the ERCOT Region (CDR)”, because it had also asked to adjust the forecast, according to a market notice.
The Three Prices on a Texas Bill
Wholesale. ERCOT “performs financial settlement for the competitive wholesale bulk-power market”, its April release says. A PUCT rule caps energy offers in that market: “The high system-wide offer cap (HCAP) will be $5,000 per MWh for energy offers”, with a lower $2,000 cap that applies in some conditions.
Delivery. The PUCT’s consumer page says: “The PUCT regulates rates charged by transmission and distribution utilities in competitive areas of Texas to cover the cost of moving electricity from where it is generated to your home”.
Retail. The same page says: “The PUCT does not set the final price of electricity charged by retail electric providers”. ERCOT administers retail switching for “more than 8 million premises in competitive choice areas”. The page also says: “If your electric provider is municipally owned or an electric cooperative, the information below does not apply to you”.
Hinojosa’s campaign page says: “As Governor, Gina will direct the Public Utility Commission to freeze the rates residential customers pay until we have laws to ensure that data centers and other high-load users pay for themselves”. The legal questions over an emergency order are set out in our first piece.
What SB 6 Already Does for Large Loads
Senate Bill 6 of 2025 set a 75-megawatt threshold and a study fee of at least $100,000. It says a large load customer “contributes to the recovery of the interconnecting electric utility’s costs to interconnect the large load”. The PUCT’s adopted rule requires “financial security in the amount $50,000 per megawatt (MW)” before a large load can enter an ERCOT study.
The law also lets ERCOT order large loads with backup generation to “either deploy the customer’s on-site backup generating facilities or curtail load” in an emergency. Loads connected after 31 December 2025 need equipment “to allow the load to be curtailed during firm load shed”.
On prices, SB 6 tells the commission to check whether its “retail ratemaking practices ensure that transmission cost recovery appropriately charges the system costs that are caused by each customer class”. It must amend its rules on wholesale transmission charges by 31 December 2026, 19 days before the inauguration, by our arithmetic.
The Structural Read
As we read the sources, the freeze and the queue sit in different places: Hinojosa’s campaign page names the rates residential customers pay, while SB 6 and the PUCT’s new rule already put study fees and $50,000-per-megawatt security on loads of 75 MW or more.
As we read ERCOT’s own caveats, the 420,812 MW is a measure of demand for connections, not of load that will appear: ERCOT says its forecast is not a prediction of what will be built, and 5.9 GW of large loads were observed energized in 2026.
Pablo Vegas, ERCOT President and CEO, release of 15 April 2026
“we believe this forecast to be higher than expected future load growth”
Three Implications
FOR TEXAS HOUSEHOLDS The PUCT says it regulates delivery rates in competitive areas but does not set the final price charged by retail electric providers; Hinojosa’s campaign page names the rates residential customers pay.
FOR RETAIL POWER PROVIDERS ERCOT says it administers retail switching for more than 8 million premises in competitive choice areas; the PUCT says it does not set their final price.
FOR DATA CENTER DEVELOPERS The PUCT’s adopted rule requires $50,000 per megawatt of financial security before a large load enters an ERCOT study, and ERCOT says energization of new data centers is paused until the audit ends.
The framework argues: “The structural bottleneck isn’t computing, it’s electrons.”
As we read it, the Texas numbers put that bottleneck in one ratio: data-center requests of 420,812 MW against a 91,134 MW record peak, 4.6 times, by our arithmetic. The framework predates the Texas freeze plan and does not discuss it.
What Is Not Established
The 474 GW are requests, not plants; ERCOT says its forecast is not a prediction of what will be built, and its audit report is not yet out. ERCOT has not published a data-center share for the 194.3 GW kept in Batch Zero. Hinojosa has not said whether a freeze would cover retail energy prices, delivery charges or both. No statement on the freeze from ERCOT, the PUCT or the Texas Data Center Council appears in the sources cited here.
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Data centers asked ERCOT for 420,812 MW as of June 2026, 4.6 times the 91,134 MW record peak, by our arithmetic. A Texas bill has three layers: a capped wholesale market, PUCT-regulated delivery rates and retail prices the PUCT does not set. SB 6 already charges large loads for studies and interconnection security. Related: the Senate’s 73-25 vote on a data center cost bill and a $10B Michigan plan that ended after 13 days.
A note on sourcing. Figures and quotations are from ERCOT’s presentations of 29 July and September 2026, its 15 April release and 18 May market notice, Governor Greg Abbott’s letter of 3 August 2026, the enrolled text of Senate Bill 6, PUCT rules 25.194 and 25.509, the PUCT’s consumer page and the Hinojosa campaign page. The record peak is marked unofficial by ERCOT. Ratios and day counts are our arithmetic. ERCOT, the PUCT and the Hinojosa transition were not contacted for this piece.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
