Texas has stopped approving new data center connections to the state power grid while regulators audit what those projects would consume, a decision that reaches a fast-growing city like Frisco through the electricity supply rather than through any single local site.
Gov. Greg Abbott issued the directive Monday, Aug. 3, in a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.
The queue behind the decision
ERCOT is tracking more than 1,800 projects waiting to connect, totaling over 474 gigawatts. For scale, that is more than five times the highest demand the Texas grid has ever actually served.
Roughly 90 percent of those requests come from data centers, according to Abbott. In January the queue was 233 gigawatts, so it has about doubled in less than six months.
Not every project in a queue gets built. Developers commonly file in several places at once, and the queue counts requests rather than commitments. That gap is part of what the audits are meant to measure.
Why a residential city has a stake
Frisco does not have to host a data center to be affected by one. Households and data centers draw from the same grid, and residential growth in Collin and Denton counties is itself adding load every year.
If large industrial users connect faster than generation is added, the pressure shows up in reliability during summer peaks and in the cost of building out transmission, which is recovered through rates.
