The Public Utility Commission of Texas approved the Batch Zero large-load interconnection framework on June 18, 2026. Developer submissions closed July 10. On Friday July 24, transmission and distribution utilities must file complete eligibility packages with ERCOT for every project in the pool. That is three business days from Tuesday. Any project the serving utility does not carry across the July 24 deadline drops out of Batch Zero and waits for a later batch window that has not yet been calendared.
The July 24 deadline is procedural on its face. In substance, it is the first hard measurement of how much of the developer-side submission stack the transmission and distribution utilities can absorb into a study that clears in April 2027. That gap is the operative variable for the rest of the process.
What Batch Zero actually is
Batch Zero is the Texas grid’s first fully batched large-load interconnection study. Under the framework approved June 18, ERCOT and the transmission and distribution utilities (TDUs, in ERCOT’s terminology, including Oncor, CenterPoint, AEP Texas, Texas-New Mexico Power, and the municipal utilities in Austin and San Antonio) evaluate large-load projects as a coordinated portfolio rather than sequentially. The batch captures any facility with 75 MW or more of combined peak demand at a single point of interconnection. Large Computational Loads, a category the PUCT defined narrowly to include data centers, cryptocurrency mining, and comparable interruptible industrial loads, carry an additional ride-through and controllability obligation inside Batch Zero. Non-Large Computational Loads at the same threshold are inside the batch on the same schedule but do not carry the ride-through overlay.
The framework runs a three-step gate. The July 10 developer submission is step one. The July 24 utility eligibility filing is step two. Step three is the Phase 1 study itself, which produces year-one-through-year-six megawatt allocations by project and by zone. Phase 1 results are targeted for April 9, 2027, with a comment window and a Commission approval step running through summer 2027 and an anticipated first commercial energization window opening late 2027 for a small subset of the batch and running through the first half of 2029 for the balance.
The queue Batch Zero is designed to absorb is not a hypothetical. ERCOT reported 198 GW of new large-load interconnection applications in the first quarter of 2026 alone, against a running large-load queue that crossed 238,000 MW earlier this year. Data centers accounted for approximately 77 percent of the tracked load requests. A project-by-project study cadence at that volume was not going to clear a useful pipeline on any horizon that matters to the hyperscaler counterparties driving the applications. Batch Zero exists to move interconnection from a project-level bottleneck to a transmission-planning problem the TDUs can solve at portfolio scale.
What the utilities have to file on July 24
Each TDU with projects in Batch Zero has to file, per project, a complete eligibility package with ERCOT by end of business Friday. The package has four components under the PUCT’s June 18 order.
First, a Load Information Form containing verified peak demand, average demand, load shape, and expected year-one energization for the project.
Second, a signed developer attestation that the project meets the definitional threshold for Batch Zero and the Large Computational Load overlay, if applicable.
Third, the stability study data set the TDU has run on the project on its own transmission network, including short-circuit contribution, dynamic model file, and expected voltage response under the ride-through envelope.
Fourth, the TDU’s own eligibility determination, meaning a documented finding that the project sits inside the TDU’s service territory, that the developer has cleared the credit and financial commitment prerequisites specified in Section 25.501 of the Substantive Rules, and that the TDU is prepared to interconnect the project on the load-side infrastructure timeline the Phase 1 allocation will assume.
Any of the four is potentially disqualifying. The TDU eligibility determination is the load-bearing component. A project that clears developer submission but does not clear utility eligibility on July 24 is out of Batch Zero, not deferred. The next window has not been named; the PUCT’s June 18 order indicated that a Batch One process would be defined after the Phase 1 study concludes in spring 2027, which puts the next practical filing window a full study cycle behind.
The read from the July 24 tape
The single most useful number that comes off the July 24 filings is the ratio of utility-eligible projects to developer-submitted projects, computed by megawatts and by count, broken out by TDU service territory.
That ratio is where the constraint sits. Developer-submitted volume is a demand signal. Utility-eligible volume is a supply signal about transmission and load-serving capacity in each TDU footprint. If the ratio clusters near unity, Batch Zero absorbs the pipeline as intended, and the April 2027 study becomes a rank-order allocation exercise on a mostly complete pool. If the ratio comes in materially below unity (below 0.6 is where the trade press has flagged the first hard constraint), then Batch Zero was already binding on the utility side before the Phase 1 study modeled a single dispatch scenario. Under that read, the megawatts that fell out on July 24 do not just wait; they either reroute to non-batch service arrangements (typically retail electric provider co-location structures that skirt the batch definition), migrate to non-ERCOT geographies with faster interconnection paths (which in 2026 practically means MISO and SPP), or exit Texas siting entirely.
A second read that lands on the same tape is the concentration of eligible megawatts inside a small number of TDU footprints. The 2026 large-load application volume is heavily weighted to a handful of counties (Ellis, Kaufman, Hood, Bexar, and Travis account for roughly two-thirds of application megawatts by ERCOT’s own Q1 tally). If July 24 eligible volume is even more concentrated than developer volume, that indicates the outbound bottleneck is not developer siting choice but transmission adequacy at specific 138 kV and 345 kV nodes the TDUs already know are constrained. That in turn maps directly to the transmission expansion CREZ-successor filings the PUCT is expected to open in Q4.
The parallel federal track
The Texas Batch Zero timeline runs directly parallel to the federal FERC Section 206 large-load track that started on June 18 with show-cause orders on all six RTOs and ISOs. On the federal side, the six informational generation adequacy reports landed on the docket July 20. Substantive tariff responses are due August 17. The Commission’s expected order window on the federal side runs from September through November 2026.
Texas and the federal track are procedurally independent, but they are analytically the same problem stated in different forums. Federally, the Commission is testing whether the existing RTO/ISO transmission service tariff remains just and reasonable given that data center load is now a majority share of new interconnection demand in three of the six RTOs. In Texas, the PUCT is asking whether the pre-Batch-Zero project-by-project interconnection framework was ever going to clear the 198 GW quarterly application volume on any horizon compatible with the developer counterparty contracts.
The July 24 utility filings will be the first structural read on the state side. The August 17 tariff responses will be the first on the federal side. Both fall inside a 24-day window, and both produce measurable inputs into the same underlying question: how does the transmission system, as currently constituted, absorb a load addition profile that is unlike anything the tariffs were written for.
What to watch on Friday
Three things will land on the July 24 tape that matter beyond the eligibility count itself.
The first is any Oncor filing that flags a Batch Zero project inside its footprint as ineligible for reasons related to the transmission expansion queue that Oncor manages under the Certificate of Convenience and Necessity framework. Oncor carries roughly half of the ERCOT large-load application volume by megawatts. Any material Oncor exclusions set the ceiling on Phase 1 volume more than any other single filing.
The second is whether CenterPoint carries the Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor projects (the industrial rather than data center segment of Batch Zero, weighted to Harris and Brazoria counties) at the same eligibility rate as its data center pool. The two use cases have different load shapes and different transmission profiles. Differential treatment on July 24 signals whether Batch Zero is going to work as a genuinely multi-industry batch or effectively as a data-center-only framework.
The third is any TDU-level filing on ride-through capability that flags a Large Computational Load project as unable to meet the overlay. The ride-through obligation is the operational hinge of the Large Computational Load designation, and a TDU-signed determination that a submitted project cannot meet it is the first real test of whether the PUCT-approved envelope is tighter than the hyperscaler operators can commit to on the timeline required.
None of the three will fully resolve on Friday. All three will move enough on Friday to reprice the Phase 1 study and to shape how the PUCT frames the Batch One process it opens next year.