Overview
- Gov. Greg Abbott sent a letter on June 10 directing the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT to identify near-term actions and file a joint memorandum by July 17 and for the PUC to act by July 31 to prevent residential customers from bearing transmission and interconnection costs.
- Abbott asked lawmakers to require new data centers to fund their own grid interconnection and infrastructure, add generation capacity, use closed-loop water systems, report annual energy and water use, adopt community protections for noise and setbacks, and repeal sales tax exemptions.
- Local officials and residents are pressing back on projects such as the AmpZ proposal outside Lufkin, where county leaders say they lack legal authority to ban builds and note the site could be a roughly 1,000-acre, $1 billion investment that would use about 500 gallons of water per day.
- The Data Center Coalition said members already follow many best practices and will work with regulators, while developers and some counties warn that limits on local power to regulate siting complicate community protections.
- Texas is seeing one of the nation’s largest data center booms with hundreds of projects and unprecedented ERCOT interconnection requests, a trend that could shift tax revenue, local land use fights, and who pays for new transmission and generation around the country.