ERCOT officials told the Public Utility Commission of Texas at an August 20 meeting that they intend to finish auditing roughly 300 data center projects in the grid operator’s Batch Zero interconnection study, each 75 megawatts or larger, and file the results by December 10. The audit follows an August 3 directive from Governor Greg Abbott ordering ERCOT and the PUCT to audit every data center advancing through the grid operator’s interconnection queue, and ERCOT has paused approvals to energize large data centers and crypto facilities until the verification is complete, according to ERCOT’s presentation to the commission. Chad Seely, ERCOT’s general counsel and chief compliance officer, told the commission ERCOT will not finish the Batch Zero study by its original April 2027 date and is “still working on what that new timeline might be,” according to Community Impact.

The scale of the backlog

ERCOT’s large-load interconnection queue held requests totaling about 474 gigawatts as of June 2026, about 90% of it from data centers, POWER reported from ERCOT’s figures. Abbott’s letter called that “more than five times Texas’ record peak electricity demand for ERCOT.” The directive asks projects to disclose ownership, financial, water and community-impact information, and warns that projects that fail to do so could be denied grid access, so queue position alone no longer carries a project forward. In the meantime, ERCOT’s presentation lists 17 large loads, with 6,608 megawatts of total peak demand over five years, that have finished every other ERCOT process and are waiting only for approval to energize.

Why it matters to the enterprise AI buying committee

Compute is the physical constraint under every enterprise AI roadmap, and Texas has been one of the default answers to “where do we site the next training or inference cluster” because of its light-touch grid and cheap power. An audit that pauses energization approvals for a state carrying nearly half a terawatt of pending large-load requests feeds directly into vendor site-selection timelines. Any enterprise with a cloud or colocation provider building new Texas capacity for AI workloads should ask that provider directly whether its project is inside ERCOT’s Batch Zero audit population, and if so, what the December 10 filing date means for the provider’s own committed delivery dates.

Source: ERCOT, Batch Zero Verification and Audit presentation to the PUCT, August 20, 2026