Texas is no stranger to power-grid anxiety. Between the heat that’s only getting hotter, an aging fleet of power plants, and the challenges of integrating renewable energy, the system is fragile.

Now, a boom in energy-hungry computer data centers is adding a new element of risk this summer.

“How many are coming? That’s still TBD, but we know that they are explosively growing,” ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas, told lawmakers in one of two hearings this month at the state capitol.

Vegas said many of those centers mine crypto currency. But more and more of them are being built to support artificial intelligence systems. They are drawn to the state thanks to low energy costs, minimal regulation and a booming economy. But they use a lot of energy.

“If you do a google search and just look up ‘What is ERCOT?’ If you did that with a regular google system versus an AI google search, the amount of energy that it takes to run the AI search, is between 10 and 30 times the power requirement than to do a traditional google search,” Vegas said.

Many estimates you find online appear to be on the lower end of that spectrum. But it’s clear that Texas, in particular, could find that growing energy demand challenging.

Ever since a deadly blackout in 2021, state officials have worked to strengthen the power grid. They’ve started programs to subsidize new power plants and improve transmission lines.

But, those things take years to build. Data centers — some that use as much energy as small cities — can be built in just a matter of months. That is a serious challenge for grid operators, says Doug Lewin, who publishes the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter.

“How do we build enough infrastructure to accommodate a new city popping up in six months, with effectively no notice?” he asks. 

The answer: maybe you don’t.

‘The most worrisome thing’

State officials have long declared Texas “open for business.” Reveling in each victory as they lured things like Tesla’s new gigafactory and Samsung’s new microchip plant to the state.

But now, some wonder whether data centers are worth it.

Cryptomines and data centers “produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid,” Lt. Governor Dan Patrick posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, after the hearings. “Texans will ultimately pay the price.”

State lawmakers, likewise, peppered this month’s hearings with questions about whether the state could put the brakes on data center growth, or compel the companies to pay for their increased energy transmission needs.

“That’s sort of wild to think about,” Lewin said. “That’s a huge, huge break from the way things have been done.”

Assuming that cryptomines and data centers are here to stay, grid operators say they would like new rules to allow them to better monitor the facilities’ energy use and potentially control it.

Despite recent legislation compelling cryptomines to register with ERCOT, Vegas told members of the House State Affairs Committee that about half of companies still have not.

“On legislation […] what would be more helpful for ERCOT is to have more visibility to what these large loads are doing,” he said. “And so a good place to start could be making sure we can track and even potentially control the [energy] loads of cryptos.”

At a recent ERCOT board of directors meeting, Dan Woodfin, the group’s vice president of system operations, said the inability to forecast energy use by crypto mines and similar big power consumers was “the most worrisome thing” going into this summer.

ERCOT puts the chance of rolling blackouts at around 12% in August.

Demand is outpacing supply

In the electricity business, what Vegas proposes — reducing energy use by certain users at certain times — is often called a “demand side” solution to grid challenges.

The idea is that you can strengthen the grid more cheaply and quickly by lowering energy consumption rather than increasing supply.

“We cannot build the grid fast enough to keep up with demand… Even before we had every damned crypto and data center … move to Texas,” Alison Silverstein, a consultant and former state and federal energy official, told KUT. 

Texas currently consumes more energy than any other state. Silverstein has long advocated for increasing energy efficiency standards in the state to help bolster the energy system.

A recent study from the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy says improving efficiency standards in Texas would be a more economical way of reducing high energy demand in the summer and winter to strengthen the grid.

Silverstein says it would not only mean people need less power to cool their homes, run their appliances and do business, it would also go a long way toward keeping the lights on.

But lawmakers and regulators have traditionally balked at improving efficiency in Texas, a state known for producing energy not conserving it.

Silverstein says that may be changing, as the challenges of rapidly increasing energy demand become clearer to those in charge of the Texas power system.

At one recent hearing ERCOT’s Vegas referred to efficiency and demand response as an essential tool in keeping the Texas grid stable.

Silverstein says the question is whether that rhetoric will turn into state policy.

“That’s when we’ll know that they really mean it in terms of demand-side solutions, and it’s not just hand waving,” she says.

AUSTIN, Texas – The case of an Austin woman who went missing 40 years ago is still a mystery. She’s one of many on a site designed to collect information about unsolved cases called “Solve the Case.”

Sharon McCully disappeared on December 11, 1984.

She was doing Christmas shopping that day and had left lunch with her husband. She dropped him off at his job and drove away, last seen going east on Howard Lane towards I-35.

Her car, an off-white 1965 Volkswagen Beetle, was found two days later, unlocked and abandoned at an apartment complex on the 8600 block of Research Boulevard, about five-and-a-half miles from her last known location. Her keys and purse were gone. 

“Sharon was not believed to have had any connection with that apartment complex,” “Solve the Case” founder Aaron Benzick said. “There’s just no information to be concerned about the husband or anyone close to her at that point.”

MISSING IN TEXAS

When her husband got home from work, she wasn’t there. After waiting and calling her friends, he reported her missing the next day. 

“Really speaks to there being an unknown factor that gets involved in this,” Benzick said. 

McCully’s story is one of many on “Solve the Case,” a place where all the facts of a case can be aggregated. 

“With the Solve the Case platform, we’re opening up for missing persons, unsolved homicides, unidentified persons, even fugitives that are on the run, have warrants out for their arrest and haven’t been found for many years,” Benzick said.

Benzick’s day job is a homicide detective in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He got the idea to create the website after he got a bulletin about a decades-old case of someone who went to the same high school as him. 

“Family had expressed some frustration, ‘we’ve been trying to promote our son’s missing person case, bring awareness of the case, and some of the things we’ve shared haven’t been updated, and we don’t really know what to do with that.’ That kind of inspired me to create this home page for victims,” he said. 

MORE STORIES

Cases on the site can come from law enforcement or families. 

“When you create the case page on Solve the Case, we’re going to walk you through. Here are the things that should be happening in your case, during a missing person investigation,” Benzick said.

For McCully’s case and so many others across the nation, “We want to build out a database of where known offenders were operating at that time,” Benzick said. “At minimum, we want to tell Sharon’s story.”

The hope is that the community can work together to solve mysteries. 

“Through creating this platform, we’re hoping to open up this information nationwide, get families, victims, law enforcement all on the same page in a consistent way so that we can do the most good on these missing person cases,” Benzick said. 

AUSTIN, Texas (KBTX) – Social media and influencers are now being more closely scrutinized when it comes to campaign spending. When you see a political ad on TV or in the newspaper, you know it was financed by someone. But what about your online feed?

This week, the Texas Ethics Commission voted to require social media personalities to disclose when they are paid to post or repost political advertisements.

Joining KBTX to discuss the topic is Daron Shaw, a Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Frank C. Erwin, Jr. Chair of State Politics at the University of Texas at Austin.

He says the requirement is taking care of a loophole that social media left in the political sphere for elections.

“The key distinction is actually one that is actually derived from federal election campaigns, but it has an application at the state level and that is what we call an in-kind contribution. If I perform a service for you, you are a candidate for office and I perform a service for you, that constitutes an an in-kind contribution, something for your campaign. But those laws have not been specified or updated, to take into account, how do we think of an influencer who is paid to say, ‘Hey go to this guy’s event, it’s happening in Austin this next weekend, it’s going to be great, it’s going to be lit, it’s going to be so awesome.’ Well, if you pay that person to do that, then essentially they are performing a service for you which is in kind to an in-kind contribution. So what TEC is trying to accomplish here, is to close what I think is increasingly seen as a loophole to state-wide campaign finance regulations,” said Shaw.

Watch the entire interview in the video above.

Shaw says campaign finance law is always evolving, and that there are two extremes on this issue in the public policy debate going on right now.

“There are people who think that we ought to have much more regulation, that we should really kind of curtail and monitor the existence of money in politics. There are other people who believe money will find its way into politics, and what is critical is disclosure, and making information about these connections, who is paying what, making that transparent to the public so that people can make a judgment,” said Shaw.

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