Load Ledger
Where the next Texas data-center gas plant lands. Every county scored on gas pipe, transmission, permitted activity, land, ERCOT demand and fiber, less community opposition on the record. Dots are the sites with live air paper at TCEQ.
Hover a county for its score and inputs; click a dot for the site, the paper and the pipe. Scroll to zoom. Static image for printing or sharing. County scores are the October 20 run; six sites were added October 27 (Issue 16): Borden, Corsicana, Taylor, Paducah and the two San Antonio plants.
How the heat is scored. Six inputs, weights stated, all public. Gas trunkline reach, 25%: miles of in-service natural-gas transmission of 20 inches or more in the county and the largest diameter present, from the Railroad Commission’s public pipeline map. Transmission, 20%: miles of 345 kV line, and of 138 to 230 kV line, from the federal HIFLD transmission dataset. Permitted activity, 20%: gas-turbine megawatts filed since January 2025 on TCEQ’s turbine list, plus the on-site power registrations filed this autumn that the list does not carry. Available land, 15%: the inverse of 2020 Census population density, which also discounts the whole score so a metro county cannot outrank open ground. Demand, 10%: the county’s base-plus-studied large load in ERCOT’s September batch-zero slides, where published. Fiber, 10%: the share of serviceable locations with fiber in the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection, December 2024 release. Community: points off where a contested-case hearing has been requested, a county has gone on record against a plant, or residents have filed with the PUC naming the county: Hill, Bee, Bastrop, Fayette, Reeves.
What it says. Upton and Pecos lead on pipe, land and wires together. Crockett and Glasscock carry the pipe, the 345 kV and the empty land with no data-center file at all, which is what a site selector is paid to notice before the first registration lands. Reeves, with more permitted megawatts than any county in Texas, drops to fourth because the federal transmission dataset shows no 345 kV line inside the county and a hearing has been requested there. Haskell County, sixth in ERCOT’s base-load ranking, scores cool: no gas trunkline of 20 inches, a 7-inch gathering line, and a 4,000-bed camp making its own power.
What it does not score, and what to distrust. Water rights, land ownership and substation headroom are not in it. The fiber input is last-mile availability, not long-haul route miles, because no public dataset carries long-haul fiber geometry; a rural co-op that built fiber to every farmhouse scores the same as a county on an interstate backbone. The transmission dataset is federal and incomplete; where it shows zero 345 kV in a Permian county, check ERCOT’s own map before you believe it. The weights will move as the record does.
What the brief adds. The weekly issue carries the step each file is stopped at in TCEQ’s tracking log, the entity behind each one from the state’s franchise records, and what moved on the dockets. This week: Bechtel has been on the Kilby site since July and registered construction engines on September 28, with the air permit still pending and the Governor’s pause in force.
The brief is free. One analyst, no positions in anything I cover.