98.6% paper

In April, ERCOT's chief executive walked Texas legislators through a number that sounds like a siege: 410,618 megawatts of new large-load requests sitting in the interconnection queue, about 87% of it data centers, roughly five times the all-time peak the Texas grid has ever delivered. Then he showed them the rest of the slide.

Of that headline figure, 293,651 megawatts — the bulk of it aimed at 2030 — has had no studies submitted at all. Just 5,778 megawatts is actually energized and observed today. The scary number is about 98.6% paper: land that happens to sit near a transmission line, filed into a queue built to handle forty or fifty large loads a year that took in 225 new requests in a single year. As one Texas data-center developer put it, there's no good way to stop people who own land with power lines running through it from putting in a request, so there's just been a ton of speculation.

What makes this worth watching isn't the 410-gigawatt headline — it's that the grid operator clearly doesn't believe it either, and is rebuilding the rules to find out. Texas now requires a deposit of $50,000 per megawatt to hold a place in the queue, and ERCOT is switching from studying each request alone to processing them in batches, both designed to make speculative filings expensive enough to evaporate. Texas runs about 15% of US data-center interconnection activity, so whatever fraction of 410 gigawatts turns out to be real is the warning shot every other grid operator is reading.