Filing day. Every Texas transmission and distribution utility with a project in the July 10 developer pool has to file a complete Batch Zero eligibility package with ERCOT by 5 pm Central today, Friday July 24. Anything not filed by the close drops from Batch Zero and waits for the next batch, which is not on the PUCT’s current published calendar. The morning setup is fixed, the filing sequence is scoped from Wednesday’s preview, and the analytical anchor sits in three sub-reads inside the Oncor package that lands in the final hour.
Two things frame the morning. First, Oncor carries roughly half of the state-wide large-load application volume by megawatts under ERCOT’s own Q2 2026 inventory, so the state-wide eligibility rate cannot resolve as a number before Oncor files. Second, the earlier utility filings are unrepresentative of the state-wide constraint on their own terms. A market that reads the AEP Texas eligibility rate at mid-afternoon and prices the state-wide aggregate off it is trading on a read that resolves in a different direction three hours later. The functional trading window on this pool is the final hour of the Friday session, not the afternoon.
The expected filing sequence
Under the PUCT’s June 18 order, filings can land any time before the 5 pm Central close. Historical pattern on comparable ERCOT protocol deadlines across 2024 to 2026 places the sequence in a predictable order.
Texas-New Mexico Power typically files in the mid-morning window, roughly 10 to 11 am Central. TNMP carries a smaller share of the state-wide megawatt pool, and the eligibility read from the TNMP filing is a floor rather than a state-wide anchor. AEP Texas has run mid-afternoon on the 2024 and 2025 comparable filings, with a 1 to 3 pm central window. The AEP Texas print gives the market its first read on a mid-sized utility with a mix of West Texas Permian load and coastal load, but again does not resolve the state-wide constraint.
CenterPoint typically files in the two to three hour window before the close, roughly 2 to 3 pm Central. The CenterPoint read is more consequential than the earlier prints because the Houston and Gulf Coast petrochemical corridor is where the last two years of announced pipeline growth has clustered outside DFW. A CenterPoint eligibility rate that runs below 60 percent would be the first meaningful signal from the tape that the state-wide constraint is binding hard. Above 80 percent, CenterPoint is a confirmatory data point that Oncor will need to invalidate.
Oncor is the largest and most complex package by count and megawatts. Oncor filings on ERCOT protocol deadlines have clustered inside the final hour more often than not across the 2024 to 2026 record. The base case for today puts the Oncor filing in the 4 to 5 pm Central window, which places the state-wide picture inside a 60 minute resolution band at the tail of the session.
Austin Energy and CPS Energy file inside their own service territories with smaller megawatt shares. Their filings do not materially reshape the state-wide aggregate. Their eligibility rates are still worth reading on their own terms because the two municipals have distinct planning postures on Large Computational Load, and any divergence between the two municipals and the investor-owned TDUs is a data point on the political geometry of the file rather than on the state-wide pool.
Sub-read one: mark the DFW-south to Oncor aggregate ratio
The Oncor transmission network divides into four load pockets that carry the material large-load pipeline: DFW-north around McKinney, Denton, and Frisco; DFW-south through Ellis and Hill counties; East Texas from Tyler to Longview along the ETT corridor; and West Texas into the Permian. The per-project eligibility disclosures in the Oncor filing aggregate into per-corridor totals, and the specific analytical anchor is the ratio of the DFW-south corridor rate to the Oncor state-wide rate.
Ellis County alone carries the largest single-county cluster of announced data center campuses inside the Oncor footprint. The DFW-south load pocket is also the corridor where the Sam Switch to Big Brown to Kaufman 345 kV backbone sits closest to its stability limit under Oncor’s own Q1 2026 planning disclosures. The tape today either shows a DFW-south rate at or above the Oncor aggregate, or it shows a DFW-south rate below.
Mark the price points. A DFW-south rate at or above the aggregate signals that Oncor has already re-modeled the stability envelope inside its planning function, and the Q4 CREZ-successor transmission expansion filing the PUCT is expected to open will run on a broader planning clock with less corridor-specific urgency. A DFW-south rate 5 to 10 points below the aggregate signals the stability constraint is binding on the specific pocket, and the Q4 filing scopes around a specific corridor project. A DFW-south rate 15 or more points below the aggregate is the scenario the market has not priced, and it would force the PUCT into a corridor-specific transmission expansion CCN filing on a compressed calendar, potentially before the September 15 stability model integration deadline the June 18 order flagged.
Sub-read two: mark the stability data coverage ratio at 90, 80, and 60
Every project in the Oncor filing has to include a short-circuit contribution set, a dynamic model file, and a voltage response envelope. Projects that appear without a complete stability data set are not disqualified. They are flagged for supplemental filing, which pushes the Phase 1 modeling one round back for that project.
Three coverage bands frame the read. Above 90 percent is the clean scenario. Oncor’s engineering function has been running ahead of the calendar, the July 10 developer submissions did not surprise the utility, and the September 15 stability model integration deadline does not bind. The 25 percent transmission planning engineering headcount build-out Oncor disclosed in the Q1 2026 CCN docket, specifically justified as necessary to keep pace with the large-load pipeline, has done its work.
The 60 to 80 percent band is the operative scenario. The developer pool ran meaningfully ahead of the utility’s internal modeling capacity. The August question becomes whether Oncor can staff further before the September 15 deadline, and the September deadline itself becomes a binding calendar constraint on the April 2027 allocation. In this band, expect a follow-on Oncor filing at the PUCT in the first week of August requesting either a deadline extension or a batch-splitting mechanism that carries the supplemental filings into a later modeling round without dropping the projects from Batch Zero entirely.
Below 60 percent is the scenario the market has not priced. It would signal that the Q1 headcount build-out was insufficient at the July 10 pipeline volume, that the September deadline cannot be met on any reasonable staffing trajectory, and that the April 2027 Phase 1 allocation will be materially smaller than the current developer pipeline implies. The pricing response in that scenario runs across power purchase agreement discussions in DFW, transmission asset valuations, and the announced-but-unpermitted hyperscaler pipeline behind the July 10 filings.
Sub-read three: count the ride-through overlay determinations
The ride-through envelope requires the Large Computational Load to remain online through voltage sags to 0.65 per unit for up to 200 milliseconds and to controllably curtail within a defined ramp during ERCOT-declared emergency operating conditions. Both obligations together define the operational hinge of the Large Computational Load classification. A TDU-signed determination that a submitted project cannot meet the envelope is a substantive removal from Batch Zero, not a supplemental filing.
The July 10 developer attestations claim the envelope for every submitted project. Today’s utility determinations are where those claims first meet a signed engineering opinion. Zero ride-through determinations is the clean scenario. One or two named determinations against a mid-sized project is a data point on the utility’s willingness to sign off on the developer attestation. Three or more determinations against named hyperscaler projects meaningfully repositions the market read on the December 2025 Google and Meta co-location filings and the Q1 2026 Amazon Web Services filings inside the Oncor footprint.
The specific projects to watch inside the Oncor footprint are the four announced hyperscaler campuses in Ellis and Hill counties. Any ride-through determination against a named campus in that cluster propagates immediately across the sector’s read on the DFW pipeline. A ride-through determination against a project outside the hyperscaler pipeline (an announced industrial load, a merchant crypto site, a co-location provider) has a narrower price impact but still carries into the August PUCT filings around the ride-through envelope specification itself, which several developers have argued in comments is calibrated too tightly for the class of loads it covers.
The Monday and week ahead read
The state-wide picture will not close on the tape today. The Oncor sub-reads print inside the last hour, and the market read that carries into Monday is a joint read on the eligibility rate, the corridor ratio, the coverage ratio, and the ride-through count taken together. Monday July 27 opens with the PUCT filing calendar visible against the Batch Zero read for the first time, and any filings docketed at the PUCT over the weekend that reference specific Batch Zero eligibility outcomes become the leading edge of the tape.
Two Monday events sit on the calendar as functions of the Friday read. The first is the Oncor Q2 2026 earnings release scheduled for Monday morning, where the Batch Zero eligibility rate becomes an implicit input to the utility’s forward-year capital expenditure guidance. A materially below-consensus eligibility rate on the Friday tape narrows the range on the capex commentary. The second is the PUCT open meeting agenda for Thursday July 30, which is expected to include the September stability model integration order in some form. A Friday coverage ratio below 80 percent forces the PUCT staff to reopen the September calendar inside that order, and the shape of the reopening becomes a data point in itself.
The rest of the week runs into the FERC Order 2023 compliance filings from the PJM interconnection queue on Wednesday July 29 and the CAISO large-load interconnection docket on Thursday July 30. Both filings will read against the ERCOT Batch Zero outcome and set the second half of the summer read on the national large-load interconnection pipeline. Friday is the anchor. The rest of the calendar sits downstream.