Texas Classifies Hundreds of Data Centers on Monday. The Audit Starts After.

Forty-one requests reached ERCOT by July 24 asking to be excused from the Batch Zero eligibility rules. Twenty-one wanted out of the qualifying interconnection study itself. That was ten days before Governor Abbott ordered anybody audited.

Verification is only worth something if it happens before the decision that depends on it. Afterward it is reconciliation. On Monday, Texas runs that distinction as a live experiment.

On August 20 the Public Utility Commission of Texas granted ERCOT three exceptions to the Batch Zero timeline that Abbott's August 3 directive had broken. ERCOT is excused from the August 7 deadline to classify large loads. It will issue conditional classifications by August 31 instead. As of Friday the verification questionnaires had not gone out.

Batch Zero, briefly. ERCOT's name for the first group of large users — 75 MW and up, overwhelmingly data centers — through a new interconnection process the PUCT approved in June. ERCOT studies them together and allocates capacity across them. Classification — base load, studied load, or excluded — decides whether and when a project connects.

In June, ERCOT said August classification was the point "at which the full scope of Batch Zero will be known." August arrived, and the scope is provisional.

What "conditional" buys

A conditionally classified project is one ERCOT has classified on the applicant's own attestations but not finally: unverified, un-rejected, and countable. Those conditionally classified as base load may be carried into the August 1 and November 1 stability assessments — six loads in August, seventeen potentially eligible for November.

To ERCOT's credit, a stability assessment is not a classification and authorizes nobody to energize. The exception is about timing: these loads did not choose the pause, and without it those due online in early 2027 would be dropped from the assessments and miss their dates.

The number underneath

ERCOT opened a one-day window on July 23 for projects that could not show strict compliance. ERCOT does not plan to advance twenty-seven of the forty-one; eleven remain under evaluation. Twenty-one of the twenty-seven asked to skip the step that establishes there is a connection to be had — a requirement ERCOT had excluded from the exception process at the outset.

They are not the only ones without that study. ERCOT's July 28 accounting had placed 315 projects, representing 274 GW, outside Batch Zero for having none. Separately, of 290 dynamic models reviewed, roughly 18 percent were acceptable on first review.

A little of this the applicants volunteered. Most of it ERCOT found.

The deadline nobody is defending

Last week we wrote that ERCOT was holding the April 9, 2027 study deadline. That was already wrong when it published. On August 20 ERCOT's Chad Seely said: "We will not have the study done by April 9, 2027." No new date has been requested, because ERCOT does not know it yet.

Abbott's List

This week's stumble does not tag to a line on the list, and that is the finding. The twenty-one asked out at the eligibility floor beneath Abbott's List, not at the list itself. When the RFIs land — ERCOT's reports are due December 10 — we name the project and the line.

None of this touches the supply side. The new generation Batch Zero is counting on sits in a different ERCOT queue that no directive has asked anyone to verify. More than 400 requests in that queue have no signed interconnection agreement and date to 2023 or earlier.

On Monday, Texas acquires a class of project that is neither verified nor rejected, and starts planning around it.