Texas Froze a 474 GW Queue Outside FERC's New Load Rule

On June 18, 2026, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission gave PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, ISO New England and NYISO 60 days to defend or rewrite the tariff rules governing how large electricity users connect to the transmission grid. The filings land on Monday, August 17, in six dockets numbered EL26-67 through EL26-72.

The definition FERC wrote is where an economic development officer should start reading. Under the show cause orders, a large load is a single-site commercial or industrial customer, not part of a co-location arrangement, with a peak load of 50 MW or more interconnecting at a voltage above 69 kV. The Department of Energy had proposed a lower bar. Its advance notice of proposed rulemaking, submitted to FERC on October 23, 2025, framed the problem around facilities of 20 MW or greater and recommended assigning 100% of network upgrade costs to the interconnecting load. FERC kept the cost principle and raised the threshold. The band between 20 MW and 50 MW, which covers most food processing, battery assembly and mid-size fabrication work, sits outside the federal remedy and stays with a state commission and a utility.

So the August 17 filings are a cost-allocation event before they are a speed event. FERC directed each grid operator to produce a standard cost recovery agreement, signed by the operator, the transmission owner and the customer, requiring the customer to make a minimum contribution to the transmission owner's revenue requirement backed by credit support. It told the operators a large-load study should take no more than 60 to 90 days. It also directed them to require hourly load forecasts, real-time telemetry, ramp rate and ride-through terms, phasor measurement units and remote disconnect capability, all at the customer's expense. A site that clears the threshold gets a clock and a price. A site below it gets neither.

Texas moved the other way in the same fortnight. On August 3, 2026, Governor Greg Abbott wrote to the Public Utility Commission of Texas and ERCOT calling for an audit of every data center in the interconnection queue, noting that requests total about 474 GW, which he said is more than five times the state's record peak demand, and that data centers make up about 90% of the new requests. ERCOT delayed its Batch Zero transmission planning study, the first set of projects to run through the state's new large load process, and said it will ask the commission for a good-cause exemption at its August 20 open meeting. ERCOT is not FERC-jurisdictional, so nothing filed on August 17 governs a Texas site. New York halted new data center approvals for up to a year in July. In the same week the audit was ordered, Meta Platforms and BlackRock announced a $14 billion, 1 GW campus in El Paso, due online in 2028 with 300 direct jobs and BlackRock holding 80% of it.

The strongest objection is that a tariff is not a megawatt. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, in the Long-Term Reliability Assessment it published on January 29, 2026, forecast summer peak demand on the bulk power system growing by 224 GW over the following decade, 69% above the 132 GW it projected a year earlier, with winter growth of 246 GW against 149 GW. It placed MISO, PJM, ERCOT and parts of the Pacific Northwest at high risk of insufficient reserve margins within five years. On that evidence a faster study reorders a queue without adding supply, and the binding constraint stays generation and transmission construction. That objection is correct, and it narrows the claim rather than defeating it. What changes on August 17 is not how much power exists. It is what a developer is told the connection will cost, how soon, and who carries the upgrade.

The claim is testable inside the year. If the six operators mostly argue that their existing tariffs are already just and reasonable and FERC accepts those defenses, the federal cost terms will not move and the question returns entirely to state commissions and utilities; parties have 30 days after the filings to comment. FERC also limited the six orders to the RTOs it regulates and left its rulemaking docket, RM26-4, open for action in non-RTO regions. A site in ERCOT, in most of the Southeast, or in the non-RTO West is governed by nothing that gets filed on Monday. ERCOT's request for more time goes to the Public Utility Commission of Texas on August 20.