Texas Grid Boss Wants Data Centers to Cut Power Before Blackouts

The boss of Texas’s electric grid will ask the state legislature for authority to require data centers to decrease power usage even before an emergency is declared. As it stands now, Texas has to be at level two of a three-alarm power emergency to request that data centers reduce power demand. Pablo Vegas, chief executive officer for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, would like to require facilities to scale back when the grid is at level one or even before that first indicator of electricity scarcity. “The practical realities of curtailing large amounts of customers like data centers and managing that from an operational point of view really requires us to think about pulling that up a little bit earlier into the process,” Vegas said Wednesday at the BloombergNEF Summit in Houston. “We really don’t want to impact residential and everyday businesses if we get into a scarcity event in the state.” Texas passed Senate Bill 6 in 2025 to require large-load customers, particularly data centers, to reduce power use with 24 hours notice. When asked if data centers support his suggested change, Vegas said everyone he’s talked to wants to ensure the electrical system works. “The hyperscalers are on board with integrating into the system and into the community in a way that works for all of the communities and all the participants in the system,” he said. “If the legislature agrees and thinks it makes sense to modify those requirements, then we can work with them on that as well.” Ercot hasn’t yet ordered data centers to curtail under SB6. However, Vegas said facilities did voluntarily decrease power demand during extreme weather this past winter, and they have access to power supply in the low single-digit-gigawatt range for the coming winter. Copyright 2026 Bloomberg. Topics Texas Was this article valuable? Thank you! Please tell us what we can do to improve this article. Thank you! % of people found this article valuable. Please tell us what you liked about it. Here are more articles you may enjoy.