Texas Gov. Greg Abbott sent a short letter to the two officials who decide whether major power projects get built in Texas: Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the Public Utility Commission, and Pablo Vegas, CEO of ERCOT, the state’s grid operator.

The directive tells them to audit every data center in ERCOT’s interconnection process and approve nothing until the work is finished.

That is no small pause. ERCOT has roughly 474 gigawatts of large new power users waiting to connect. About 90% are data centers. Together, they would require more than five times as much electricity as Texas has ever used at once.

Abbott also wants each project to disclose five things: every tax break it has received or expects to receive; how much power it will consume and generate; how much water it will use and how it will cool its equipment; how it will address noise and traffic; and who actually owns it.

Those are reasonable questions. The way Abbott asked them created a mess.

His directive landed four days before ERCOT’s most important deadline of the year. The timing is the whole story.

What ERCOT spent a year building

Strip away the acronyms and the problem is simple arithmetic.

Hundreds of data centers want to connect to the Texas grid at the same time. A single large facility can consume as much electricity as a small city. Whether the grid can handle all that demand — and who pays when it cannot — is the fight underneath every filing.

Studying the projects one at a time was hopeless, so ERCOT built a new process. The Public Utility Commission approved it June 18, and ERCOT called it the first of its kind in the country.

“Batch Zero” was supposed to study every proposed load of at least 75 megawatts together, rather than march through each project one by one.

When ERCOT announced the plan’s approval, it said 438,000 megawatts of proposed demand were waiting in line. Nearly 89% came from data centers. By the time Abbott sent his letter six and a half weeks later, ERCOT’s count had reached 474 gigawatts.

The line was growing faster than anyone could study it.

ERCOT had promised to tell applicants where they stood by Aug. 7. Instead, on Aug. 3 — the same day Abbott sent his letter — ERCOT issued Market Notice M-A080326-01, suspended Batch Zero and acknowledged that it would miss the deadline. It said it would ask the commission for permission to change course at the agency’s Aug. 20 meeting.

The process ERCOT spent a year building stopped in the middle.

Hill County paid for this fight first

The local version of this fight has already reached federal court.

On May 12, the Hill County Commissioners Court voted 3-2 to impose a moratorium on data center construction. Two weeks later, developer RCM Hill LLC sued the county and the three commissioners who supported the measure: RCM Hill LLC v. Hill County, No. 6:26-cv-00340, filed May 27 in the Western District of Texas.

The complaint is a plain lesson in leverage.

RCM says it spent 16 months and nearly $1 million securing more than 800 acres, backed by over $80 million in land contracts, for a 1,235-megawatt data center. It wants the court to declare the moratorium an unlawful taking, void the pause and make the county pay.

The contrast with Abbott is hard to miss.

A rural county tried to slow one data center and got hauled into federal court. Weeks later, the governor froze every data center moving through the state’s grid process with a letter. So far, no one has sued him.

What happens next

For now, little is settled.

Abbott’s letter is a directive, not a law. It gives no deadline for completing the audit. The immediate test is whether the Public Utility Commission grants ERCOT’s request to revise or restart Batch Zero at its Aug. 20 meeting.

Until then, the country’s largest queue of new electricity demand is frozen.

The disclosure requirements are the part worth keeping. Tax breaks, actual power demand, water use and ownership are questions that communities and grid planners have been asking for years, often without getting straight answers. Abbott now wants every project to answer them at once.

But the audit has a large blind spot. It covers only projects seeking a connection to ERCOT. A data center that builds its own power supply and never asks to connect was never part of the 474-gigawatt figure in the first place.

Texas has just learned that a governor can stop these projects with a letter more easily than Hill County could stop one with a vote.

Whether that holds is what matters now.