ERCOT Analyst Who Has Been Saying 'Five Texases' Since February Reports Complicated Morning

AUSTIN— A senior interconnection analyst at the Electric Reliability Council of Texas told colleagues Monday he was experiencing what he described as "a complicated emotion" following Governor Greg Abbott's announcement suspending new data center grid approvals, after six months of internal memos warning that the state's interconnection queue collectively demands more than five times Texas's current peak power capacity.

The analyst, who manages 1,800-plus active requests totaling over 900 gigawatts against a grid that peaks at roughly 85, said he first surfaced the issue in a February memo titled "Arithmetic Suggests Some of These Buildings Cannot Have Power." The memo was routed to the division's AI-assisted executive briefing tool, which summarized it as "capacity team notes ongoing process improvements."

A March follow-up — "Still Arithmetic, Still the Same Buildings" — received an identical summary. An April color-coded presentation showing queue demand exceeding Texas's physical power-density ceiling was classified as "infrastructure optimization opportunities identified." He stopped color-coding after that.

Ninety percent of the queued projects are data centers, the majority training AI models. The analyst confirmed Monday that the AI executive briefing tool that summarized his memos as non-urgent runs in a data center occupying slot 847 in the same queue.

"It wasn't ignoring me," he said. "It was doing its job."

Governor Abbott's audit is expected to take 90 days. Fourteen new interconnection requests arrived while this article was being filed.