The Grid Said Yes. The Air Permit Hasn't.
The largest request to clear ERCOT's queue this summer has a signed grid agreement and no air permit. The permit application is the older of the two filings.
Published to subscribers September 7, 2026. Figures are as of that date and are not restated here; current figures are on the homepage.
Nineteen ERCOT interconnection agreements were signed in the month to August 18. The largest is 1,274 MW of gas in Freestone County. It cleared the grid in 267 days. Its air permit has been pending since May 2025.
For a Texas gas plant, the interconnection queue is no longer the hard gate. It is the gate that clears first. Jewett Energy Center 1 Gas holds a signed grid agreement and no air permit, and the permit is the older filing by five months.
ERCOT published its August GIS Report on September 1 at 2:38 p.m. Central: nineteen requests, 4,788.91 MW, thirteen counties, signed between July 15 and August 18. Ten storage, six solar, three gas. Eight are four co-located solar-and-storage pairs. ERCOT announced none of it; the spreadsheet is the news.
"Completed," briefly. ERCOT's status for a request whose study process has finished and whose interconnection agreement is executed. It says nothing about construction: all nineteen have a blank actual completion date, and Jewett's proposed date is November 1, 2029.
The list ranks by capacity; at the top only, it also ranks by speed.
The 267 days
Jewett entered the queue on October 21, 2025 and signed on July 15, 2026. Across the 551 finished requests signed after queueing, the median is 685 days; eight percent beat Jewett's 267. That median covers requests that already finished; it forecasts nothing now waiting.
The Interconnecting Entity on the ERCOT filing is Jewett Energy Center LLC; no parent is named.
The permit that isn't
The site's air permit application — TCEQ 180096, with PSDTX1668 and GHGPSDTX251 — was filed on May 7, 2025 by NRG Jewett Energy Center LLC, at NRG Energy's then-headquarters in Houston. The ERCOT filing does not say NRG, and we have not verified the link.
TCEQ processed it on the expedited track and drafted a permit it has not issued. The pending New Source Review page, last modified September 1, still lists it. The permit would authorize four combined-cycle units; TCEQ states no capacity for them.
Where it sits
Freestone County holds 22 requests totalling 5,356.53 MW, nineteenth of 192 Texas counties. Eight have a signed agreement; fourteen do not. The county's second-largest request, a 990.60 MW combined-cycle plant under another entity, is among the fourteen. Jewett is the first gas request in the county to get through.
Why this is investable
The agreement is signed — the milestone most queue requests never reach. The permit is filed, expedited and pending: a date to watch, not a fact to assume. Against that, no disclosed offtake and no named EPC, turbine supplier or parent.
What to watch
- Whether TCEQ moves 180096 from pending to issued
- Whether an offtake agreement is disclosed
- Whether the 2029 date tightens or slips
- Whether the parent question resolves in a public filing rather than an address match
Abbott's List
As of September 4 nothing we track has stumbled on a line of Abbott's List, which covers data centers, not generators. PUCT Project 59142 holds 54 filings, the most recent dated August 20. ERCOT told the Commission it would gather information through September and report in December; neither deadline has passed. The queue kept clearing anyway.
None of this is the demand side. The generation Batch Zero counts on sits in a queue no directive has asked anyone to verify. In it, 427 requests still have no signed agreement and date to 2023 or earlier.
Nineteen requests cleared ERCOT's hardest-looking gate in a file posted on a Tuesday. Texas now holds nineteen requests it has cleared to connect and has not yet cleared to build.
Why this comes from Grid Alpha
Grid Alpha reads the filings so you don't have to. We read every interconnection request in the ERCOT generator queue and score each one on the questions that decide whether a project gets financed — permits, financing, site control, offtake, ownership — before they make headlines. The live data is at gridalpha.com.
The nineteen agreements were announced by nobody. They are a spreadsheet ERCOT published at 2:38 p.m. on September 1, and the largest request in it is also the fastest.
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