Texas Gov. Greg Abbott opened a $350 million program Wednesday to let nuclear developers apply for new state funding to bring more power generation online to meet an expected surge in demand from data centers.
The plan arrived the same day the state Senate’s Business and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing to ask regulators and grid managers how they plan to connect large power users to the grid without causing outages or raising prices for residents and small businesses. Abbott said in a statement that the fund will help jump-start a new nuclear energy ecosystem in Texas.
“To power the Texas of tomorrow, we must boost our state’s advanced nuclear capacity,” the Republican governor said.
CEO Pablo Vegas of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s main grid operator, said at a conference Tuesday that large power users have applied to pull 410 gigawatts of electricity from the ERCOT grid — up from about 150 GW of large load applications the system was tracking two weeks earlier, Vegas said. Observers don’t expect that much new Texas capacity to be needed anytime soon, but there is wide agreement that ERCOT’s peak grid demand of just over 85 GW will go much higher in the years ahead.
