Texas installs a gatekeeper on its grid

The directive that Greg Abbott, Texas's governor, sent to state regulators on Monday runs to five requirements, and four of them concern physics. Each data-center developer in ERCOT's queue must now disclose how much power it will draw and whether it can generate any of its own; how much water it will consume and by what cooling method; what it collects in tax abatements and expects the public to cover; and what it will do about the noise, traffic, and light its neighbors have to live beside. The fifth requirement asks something else. It wants the ownership and controlling interests behind each project. A grid does not need to know who owns the load it carries. A state deciding which loads to admit does.