Texas Pauses Data Center Approvals as ERCOT Rule Names Northern Virginia

A Survey Failure Halted the Process That Administers Behavior

Texas wrote its new grid rule with northern Virginia in mind. The prohibition on sag-counting schemes that took effect August 1 carries ERCOT's own note "Intent is to mitigate risk as seen in northern Virginia events". In July 2024 about 1,500 megawatts of data center load came off the Eastern Interconnection at once after a line fault, and NERC interviewed the owners. A faulted line does not produce a single voltage depression: the breaker opens and recloses to test whether it has cleared, and a scheme set for three attempts at each end produced six in 82 seconds. The facilities' controls were set to transfer the building to backup power on a count of three within a minute, and to stay there until a person reconnected them. Nothing on either side malfunctioned. On July 22, 2026, an Ashburn-area fault did it again, more than 3 gigawatts moving to backup within minutes. Two days after the rule took effect, Governor Greg Abbott paused the process that administers it, pending an audit prompted by a different failure: data centers not answering the state's water-and-power survey.

• The Directive and Its Stated Trigger. ERCOT is weighing roughly 474 GW of connection requests, about 90 percent of them data centers and more than five times the grid's record peak. The letter directs an audit of every data center in the queue and denies connection to any that fails the commission's, the operator's or state law's requirements. Its stated cause is not a grid event: "The failure of some data centers to comply with the PUC's survey measuring water and power usage under the General Appropriations Act makes this necessary". The five categories that follow are incentives, electricity consumption and on-site generation, water and cooling, community impacts and ownership.
• The Survey That Was Not Answered. The Texas Tribune and E&E News both report Texas Water Development Board officials telling a June state House committee that about 17 percent of data centers answered a mandatory water-use survey, against a statute that requires recipients to return it and makes non-response a Class C misdemeanor. The commission's own voluntary water-use study drew a response rate below 30 percent. The same month, the governor pledged to seek legislation requiring large data centers to report electricity and water usage to the commission annually. June proposed the reporting; August cited the reporting failure. The instrument is internally coherent on its own terms.
• What Stopped. ERCOT told the market the same day that, based on the directive in the governor's letter, it would not notify providers how any Large Load is classified in the Batch ZeroERCOT's one-time system-wide study that converts a queue of already-studied large loads into year-by-year megawatt allocations against shared transmission constraints. It replaced a serial process that ERCOT said it had outgrown, and it is the process the August directive paused. study by August 7, and that it would seek a good cause exception on the Batch Zero timelines before the commission's August 20 open meeting. Batch Zero is the one-time system-wide study that turns an interconnection request into a year-by-year megawatt allocation; five days earlier ERCOT had told a Texas Senate panel that roughly 205 GW was eligible. The Data Center Coalition said the review can "showcase the good actors" rather than delay them. What the notice stops is classification. It says nothing about review of the dynamic models already submitted, and nothing about the ride-throughThe obligation to stay connected and keep drawing power through a defined voltage or frequency excursion rather than tripping or transferring to backup. It is a behavior duty, not a consumption limit, and it is the opposite of what a facility's own protection is usually designed to do. duties.
• The Gate That Had Already Removed Projects. ERCOT's eligibility slide, with data as of July 28, carries this category: "Not Included In Batch Zero - No Dynamic ModelAn executable representation of a facility that a transmission planner drops into a network case and runs. Its input is the voltage and frequency at the facility's terminals over time; its output is the current the facility draws, cycle by cycle. In practice it is the site's own protection and control settings handed to the grid operator in machine-readable form. (47): These loads had one or more studies that made them eligible for inclusion but were removed when no dynamic model was submitted to ERCOT by July 10". A dynamic model is the file that describes how a site behaves electrically.
• The Rule That Took Effect Two Days Earlier. NOGRR282 and NPRR1308 were approved by the commission on July 9 and took effect on August 1. Under Section 2.14(2) a qualifying load "shall remain connected to the Transmission Grid during voltage conditions requiring ride-through," and under 2.14(2)(b), for a sag below 0.9 per unitVoltage expressed as a fraction of nominal. A sag to 0.8 per unit is a 20 percent drop; the Texas rule's continuous band is 0.90 to 1.10, and everything below 0.90 carries a minimum ride-through time. that recovers within two seconds, it "shall continue consuming active power from the grid during the low voltage condition," may reduce consumption proportional to the voltage drop, and "shall return to 90% of its pre-disturbance consumption level from the grid within two seconds" of voltage recovering above 0.9 per unit.