Texas slams on the brakes for 1,800 data centers, power grid requirements are 5 times higher than peak record demand — 474 gigawatts of power requests are now subject to new moratorium

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1309635/texas-slams-on-the-brakes-for-1800-data-centers-power-grid-requirements-are-5-times-high

www.texastribune.org/2026/08/03/texas-data-center-project-audit-greg-abbott/

Seems like a couple summers ago Texans were sweltering for lack of electric power to run their AC. Checking grid capacity should have been the job of whichever branch of state gov’t handed out these 1800 permits. Was the approval fee a box of steaks?

A lot of that AC usage comes down to poor insulation, older and poorly maintained units, single family housing, overly large housing, vacant housing that still needs to be cooled to keep it from deteriorating before someone can cover the inflated asset price, the need to insulate offices separately from housing because we’ve abolished work-from-home rules…

A well-maintained stock of publicly accessible homes in dense mixed-use walkable neighborhoods, with a professionally managed building-wide AC unit, could reduce the per-capita electricity demand enormously.

But instead, we’ve queued up billions of dollars in concrete and steel to build city-sized warehouses for scorching hot chipsets.

Bruh, a window a.c. is sold in grocery stores for under 200$ stfu.

That doesn’t seem necessary.