Lining Up for the Grid: Where 438 GW of New Texas Power Wants to Plug In

October 2026

📘 Summary

Every power plant that wants to connect to the Texas grid has to get in line first. That line is ERCOT's generation interconnection queue, and ERCOT publishes it every month in its GIS Report. The September 2026 report lists 1,758 proposed projects totaling 438.5 gigawatts, spread across 192 of Texas's 254 counties.

To put that in perspective, it's roughly five times the most power Texans have ever used at one moment. It's also close in size to the other side of the boom: more than 474 GW of large-load requests, mostly data centers, waiting to draw power from the same grid, as we covered in The 20% Walkaway. Both queues are full of projects that will never be built. But together they show where developers are betting, and which communities may be next to host a solar farm, a battery yard or a gas plant.

We added up the September queue county by county. Here's what stands out:

• Pecos County is in a league of its own. 56 projects and 21.4 GW, nearly double the next county and about 5% of the entire statewide queue.
• Batteries and solar dominate. Battery storage makes up about 36% of queued capacity (157 GW) and solar about 34% (150 GW). Gas is 18% (79 GW) and wind 11% (48 GW).
• Gas is concentrated. In Wilbarger, Reeves, Hill and Fisher counties, gas is the largest fuel in the queue, including a single 3,000 MW gas project in Fisher County.
• Most of it is early. About two-thirds of the queued capacity (290 GW) doesn't have a signed interconnection agreement yet. Only about 10 GW is listed as under construction.

🗺️ The Top 15 Counties

These 15 counties hold 407 projects and 127.7 GW, about 29% of all the capacity in ERCOT's queue. Capacity is the total nameplate size of every proposed project in the county; "largest fuel" is the fuel type with the most megawatts there.

What's behind the numbers

• Pecos County has a bit of everything: about 8.9 GW of solar, 5.9 GW of gas, 4.7 GW of wind and 1.9 GW of batteries. Its largest single entry is the 1,500 MW Big Canyon Wind project. Amazon's off-grid gas plant, which we covered in The Biggest Polluter, isn't meant to connect to the ERCOT grid, so it isn't part of these numbers.
• Brazoria County, south of Houston, is the battery capital of the queue, with about 5.7 GW of storage proposed, plus solar, wind and gas.
• Harris County is almost all batteries: about 6.2 GW of its 6.8 GW is storage, sited close to the region's biggest demand center.
• Wilbarger, Reeves, Hill and Fisher counties lead with gas. Fisher County's 6.4 GW includes a single 3,000 MW gas project, Brazos Energy Security, and Hill County's largest entry is a 1,400 MW gas plant.
• Lamar County, on the Red River, includes a 1,232 MW pumped-storage hydro project named Southeast Oklahoma Pumped Storage, which ERCOT lists under Lamar County.

⚠️ What the Queue Does and Doesn't Tell You

A spot in the queue is a request, not a promise. Developers often file for more sites than they'll ever build, and many projects drop out after the first studies show what grid upgrades would cost. In the September report, about 66% of the queued capacity hadn't reached a signed interconnection agreement, and only about 2% was listed as under construction.

ERCOT also doesn't publish exact project locations in this report, only the county. So the table shows where developers are looking, not which property line a project will sit on. If a large project is listed in your county, the next places to look are your county commissioners' agendas, any tax abatement requests, and TCEQ air permits for gas plants. Our Data Center Near You guide walks through how to find them.

🧾 Conclusion

Texas's grid queue is huge, and most of it is speculative. But speculation still has an address. The counties at the top of this list are where land agents, developers and tax abatement requests are most likely to show up next, and where residents have the most reason to watch their local agendas now, before projects are locked in.

We'll update these numbers as ERCOT publishes new monthly reports. For more analysis on Texas energy and AI, visit PowerGrabTX.com.