A kWhBill experiment
Can Texas Power the AI Buildout?
KWhBill tracks what power costs. This page asks whether the power will be there.
One page of Texas power-availability facts, drawn from the generation interconnection queue and the large-load interconnection queue — two different queues that are not the same thing. Every number below has a source and a cutoff date.
The queue in numbers
Source: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up 2026 Edition (data through end of 2025)
- 408 GW active. ERCOT's interconnection queue holds 1,527 projects seeking to connect — generation plus storage — second only to the non-ISO West (567 GW). Nationally, 8,244 projects totaling 2,061 GW (1,312 GW generation, 749 GW storage) are actively seeking grid interconnection.
- 119 GW with draft or executed interconnection agreements.ERCOT has more queue capacity at this stage than any other region (3 GW additional suspended). Nationally, 549 GW sits at this stage but has not reached commercial operation — including 256 GW solar, 161 GW storage, 76 GW wind, and 45 GW gas. A signed agreement is not a built power plant.
- 24% completion in ERCOT — the highest of any region. Of interconnection requests submitted from 2000–2020, 24% reached commercial operation in ERCOT (by number of requests), ahead of ISO-NE (18%) and well ahead of CAISO (8%). Nationally, just 13% of queued capacity from that cohort had come online by end of 2025; 75% had been withdrawn.
- Texas is ≥20% of the national queue in every fuel.The state map shows Texas holding at least one-fifth of active U.S. queue capacity in each of gas (253 GW national, +86% in 2025), solar (773 GW), storage (749 GW), and wind (220 GW).
- Slow pipeline. The median project that reached commercial operation in 2025 spent 61 months — over five years — from interconnection request to operation (national figure; ERCOT runs faster than most regions).
Queue data were compiled, cleaned, and aggregated by LBNL in partnership with GridTracker; the dataset is licensed CC BY 4.0, used here with attribution to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and GridTracker.
The other queue: large loads
ERCOT also runs a separate large-load interconnection process for loads of 75 MW and above — data centers, bitcoin miners, hydrogen. This is a different queue from the generation queue above, and the two cannot be netted against each other.
- ≈200 GW screened in Batch Zero's first classification round(industry reporting, September 2026): 362 large-load requests totaling 191.8 GW classified, with 204 projects / 66.4 GW conditionally counted as base load. Nothing here is final energization approval.
- ≈474 GW of total large-load requests were cited in the Texas governor's August 3, 2026 directive — roughly five times ERCOT's all-time peak demand of ~86 GW, with ~90% reportedly from data centers.
- New large-load interconnections are paused pending a verification audit ordered by the governor; ERCOT did not issue its planned August 2026 Batch Zero classifications.
Load-side figures are drawn from September 2026 industry reporting on ERCOT publications (trade press), not from a primary LBNL dataset — treat them as directionally indicative, not audited.
What it means for site selection
Three observations, no procurement advice: the 408 GW generation queue is overwhelmingly requests, not firm capacity — history says roughly three in four requests never build. The 119 GW with signed agreements is the nearest-term serious pipeline, but even signed capacity withdraws at material rates (41% of nationally IA-signed capacity from 2000–2022 had withdrawn by end of 2025). The large-load queue is measured in a separate process with its own rules and a current pause — do not read generation-queue totals as supply available to new data centers.
Evidence & limits
- Price: Texas residential average 15.88¢/kWh, U.S. 18.31¢/kWh — EIA retail-sales snapshot for July 2026, as published on kwhbill.com state pages.
- Generation queue: LBNL Queued Up 2026 Edition — data through December 2025; Excel data file updated May 2026; report published June 2026.
- Regional labeling: LBNL reports at the ERCOT-region level. ERCOT is the Texas grid operator's footprint — it is not exactly the state of Texas, and this page labels ERCOT-measured figures as ERCOT, not Texas.
- Two queues, two stories: the generation queue (LBNL) and the large-load queue (ERCOT Batch Zero) are independent processes. Comparing the two totals is descriptive, not predictive.
- No proven causality: a growing queue does not mechanically mean rising retail prices — or lower ones. This page does not make that claim.
- Not advice: an information briefing from public sources — not legal, investment, or energy-procurement advice.
Why this page exists
This page is an experiment: before building anything on the supply side, we publish one page and see whether anyone reads it. If there is real search demand, it grows into a section or a site. If not, this page stays a one-page archive. That's the whole plan.
Texas power availability, as it changes.
A kWhBill experiment. Data through December 2025 unless noted.