Texas power grid provider ERCOT is set to announce the criteria for its fast-track revised large-load interconnection process.

First reported by Inside Climate News, Jeff Billo, ERCOT’s vice president of interconnection and grid analysis, said that Batch Zero will prioritize large load requests that have been in the queue for some time and do not require restudy. Projects that are less advanced will be reviewed in later batches.

The requests are mainly from data centers, crypto mining operations, industrial facilities, and hydrogen projects. “There are a lot of details to fill out there,” Billo said. “We are still really early in the process of designing how that batch study would work.”

ERCOT is in the process of overhauling its transmission planning process as the number of large load requests has surged. The system, originally designed to handle 40 to 50 projects, received approximately 225 new interconnection requests in 2025.

Texas Public Utilities Commission chairman Thomas Gleeson said uncertainty about queue positions has been a major concern for data center developers, some of whom have waited years. “Transparency around this is going to be critically important to ensuring success,” Gleeson said.

Under the previous approach, each project was studied at a time, which led to restudies as new requests entered the queue and altered transmission requirements. Early discussions with companies, including Google, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI, and utilities such as CenterPoint, found that the uncertainty created unnecessary risk for developers.

ERCOT’s new batch process is intended to address that by assessing how much power ERCOT can reliably deliver and identifying transmission upgrades needed to support full interconnection.

For instance, Billo said a developer requesting 500MW by 2028 might initially receive 100MW if that is all the grid can support until a transmission upgrade is completed in 2030. Once upgrades are finished, the developer will receive the full 500MW.

After each batch study, developers will have a set period to make financial commitments, allowing ERCOT to proceed with transmission projects tied to firm demand.

Billo said early feedback from hyperscale data center operators, developers, and power generators has been supportive. “Everyone that we have talked to so far has been supportive of us moving to a batch study process,” he said.

Texas is becoming a hotbed of data center development, thanks to its ample land and energy resources. Recent developments include a 1.4GW data center campus in Shackelford County, being developed by Vantage, for which the company has recently broken ground.

Other notable developments include Crusoe’s 200MW+ Abilene data center campus, QTS’s planned data center campus in Dallas, and Microsoft's latest data center development in San Antonio.