Texas's 410 GW Data Center Queue: State Affairs Committee Meeting on ERCOT, Water & the AI Race
The short version: Texas regulators are staring down a 410,000+ MW data-center queue that dwarfs the grid — and the gas buildout to feed it is now outpacing wind.
Our Take
James Dickey's rundown of the April 9 House State Affairs hearing is worth your time because the numbers are almost too big to process casually: over 410,000 MW sitting in ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue, 87% of it data centers, with 130,000 MW added in just six weeks. That's not incremental growth — that's a queue that has roughly doubled Texas's existing grid capacity on paper, and the state's own regulators, utilities, and the Data Center Coalition are now publicly hashing out whether any of it is real demand or speculative land-banking by developers hedging their bets across multiple sites.
The detail that should stop you cold is the gas queue passing the wind queue for the first time in years — a quiet signal that the 'AI needs clean power' narrative is losing to the 'AI needs power now' reality. When Oncor, Vistra, and grid planners are testifying about hitting a 2027-2028 energization wall, that's code for: someone is going to eat higher interconnection costs, transmission buildout, and possibly rate impacts, and it likely won't be the hyperscalers who filed the requests. Texas ratepayers and water users rarely get a vote on which of these 410 GW of requests actually get built next to their communities.
This is exactly the kind of committee-room math that decides your power bill and your local water table years before a single server rack shows up. Check our facility map to see what's already staked out near you, and use our take-action page if you want to push for actual transparency in how these queue numbers translate into real projects.
This is GridWatch the USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of James Dickey, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.