Texas grid operators told regulators Thursday they expect to finish auditing the state’s data center boom by December, working through roughly 250 to 300 large facilities in the first wave of review plus another 157 medium-sized ones identified so far. The number waiting behind them is much larger: ERCOT’s interconnection queue holds more than 1,800 proposed projects requesting 474 gigawatts of power, over five times the grid’s record peak demand.
Governor Greg Abbott ordered the audit on August 3, pausing new grid connections for large power users until regulators verify what developers have claimed about their energy and water use, ownership, tax incentives and effect on nearby communities. The pause has real gaps. It does not touch data centers already approved and under construction, ones that generate their own power instead of drawing from the grid, or facilities outside ERCOT’s territory. What is being audited is the “Batch Zero” cohort, the first group cleared for connection under standards ERCOT adopted earlier this year, plus a second tier of 25-to-75-megawatt consumers state law already requires to report their usage. “It’s a tremendous amount of information that’s going to have to come back into ERCOT,” the grid operator’s senior vice president, Chad Seely, told the commission Thursday.
A different kind of data center anxiety surfaced a day earlier, in a memo the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent to AI companies and that Axios published in full. Titled “Ohio Data Center Risk,” it describes Republican Senator Jon Husted and Democrat Sherrod Brown locked in “a dead heat” in Ohio’s November 3 special election, with data centers functioning as what the memo calls the “sleeper issue for this entire cycle.” Brown has aired ads accusing Husted of having “force-fed” Ohio with “massive energy-sucking facilities,” and the memo concedes the attack is landing: “More than any other thing in this race, data centers are the anchor hanging around Husted’s neck.”
The memo’s ask is unusual for a party committee: it tells AI companies that campaigns and committees cannot fix an entire industry’s reputation, so the companies that need these projects built have to do it themselves, addressing who benefits, who pays, and why a community should want one nearby. Husted’s campaign points to a bill he introduced requiring data centers to cover their own power costs and return excess electricity to the grid. Brown counters that Husted could have written those safeguards into law years ago, when he ran the Ohio Statehouse that recruited the projects in the first place.
The memo’s own warning reaches past Ohio. “If voters’ perceptions of data centers are not fixed quickly,” it states, “the campaign against them will expand far beyond Ohio.” Abbott’s audit is framed around grid reliability and ratepayer costs, not voter sentiment, so it is a different kind of scrutiny than what Husted is facing in Ohio. But the same month a national Republican committee is asking the AI industry to fix how it looks to the public, a governor who spent last year calling Texas an AI epicenter now has 450 of his own state’s projects under compliance review.
Pennsylvania made its own data center standards mandatory this week, and New York capped large new projects with a one-year moratorium in July, as the backlash Texas and Ohio are living through spreads state by state.
Sources: Houston Public Media, WCPO, Daily Caller News Foundation
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By the Control Plane Editorial Team