Texas Halved the Deposit a 75-Megawatt Data Center Must Post

The Public Utility Commission of Texas has adopted the rule that decides which large electrical loads get to connect to the state grid, and the final version costs roughly half as much to enter as the draft the commission floated in March. The rule, written into 16 Texas Administrative Code Section 25.194 under Project No. 58481, applies to any new or expanded load of 75 megawatts or more in the ERCOT region.

The rulemaking implements Senate Bill 6, signed June 20, 2025, which handed the commission authority over how data centers and other large customers line up for power. The March draft required a developer to post $50,000 per megawatt in financial security on executing an intermediate agreement, then pay a second, non-refundable $50,000 per megawatt once the studies were finished. Study fees were tiered on top of that: at least $100,000 for a project between 75 and 249 megawatts, and at least $300,000 for anything at 250 megawatts or above.

The adopted rule drops the non-refundable charge entirely and replaces the tiered study fee with a flat $100,000 regardless of project size. It returns a developer's full financial security once any outstanding amounts are applied, rather than the 20 percent the draft released up front. It also stretches the window for reporting a missed energization milestone to 24 months, measured against the overall schedule instead of each individual date. The commission made those concessions while ERCOT's large-load queue sat near 474 gigawatts, a total the grid operator's own tracking has attributed roughly nine-tenths to data center projects.

For the contractors who build this work, the practical question is how many campuses survive the paperwork. A cheaper front door and a longer grace period mean fewer projects die over a deposit or one slipped date, which pushes more substation, switchgear, and medium-voltage feeder scope toward actual construction. It also means schedules drift rather than cancel, so backlog stretches further out than the announcement dates suggest, and crews get staged against energization windows that can move two years without a project being declared dead.

Anything that clears the queue will be wired to a code that changed three weeks ago. The Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation adopted the 2026 National Electrical Code as the state electrical code effective September 1, with a narrow exception covering ground-fault protection on certain outdoor outlets. Electricians renewing a Texas license take their continuing education against that edition, and inspectors are applying it to the campuses now moving through interconnection. A journeyman hired onto a Texas data center this fall is working a job whose financing cleared under one rule and whose conduit gets inspected under another.

The cost of getting into the ERCOT queue changed. The cost of building what comes out of it did not.