ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue reached about 226 GW by November 2025 — roughly quadruple a year earlier — with about 73% from data centers and an unknown share of speculative 'phantom load'

energygridtexasercotinterconnectiondata-centersai-infrastructurephantom-load2026quant

Large electricity users seeking to connect to the Texas grid must join ERCOT's large-load interconnection queue. Per Latitude Media, "ERCOT has about 226 gigawatts of large load customers in its interconnection queue as of November [2025]. That's nearly quadruple what it reported at the end of 2024, at 63 GW," with "about 77% of that load" attributable to data centers — a figure ERCOT's own board deck for the same 18 November 2025 snapshot does not support: the primary states "~73% are data centers" (Item 16.2, System Planning and Weatherization Update, Board of Directors meeting December 8–9 2025, slide 2; direct-read at audit 2026-09-11; see claim-ercot-primary-source-73-percent-data-centers-not-77-percent). Latitude Media's "77%" is kept here as what the Tier-2 source said; the title and H1 now carry ERCOT's ~73%. For scale, 226 GW is several times ERCOT's typical peak demand, and the report notes that only on the order of ~23 GW of new generation was actually added across 2024–25 — a gap between requested load and deliverable supply far too large to reflect real, imminent projects.

Grid operators cannot tell how much of the queue is genuine. ERCOT is described as "getting flooded with speculative or 'phantom' load requests that may not materialize" — developers filing multiple or duplicative interconnection requests to hold position, so the headline number overstates true demand by an unknown margin. The uncertainty is itself the planning problem: building generation and transmission against a queue that may be largely optioned-but-unreal risks either over- or under-building.

This is the demand-side, Texas-specific counterpart to the national generation interconnection backlog (which measures supply waiting to connect, not load), and it concentrates inside the distinctively-regulated isolated Texas grid. It is also the demand pressure behind supply-side bets like Microsoft's Three Mile Island restart, and the same tight compute-to-grid coupling that Bit2Watt shows can be weaponized.