Data centers are not light industry. They are heavy industrial loads that consume electricity, water, and clean air at a scale Texas has never tried to support before. The numbers below come from ERCOT itself, the Texas Observer, the Harvard School of Public Health, and peer reviewed research. None of this is speculation and some of it is already happening.
ERCOT's own forecast, up from 85.5 GW in 2023. The PUCT sent the forecast back calling it inflated. Even the revised version still shows demand exploding.
As of December 2025, ERCOT is monitoring 226 GW of large load interconnection requests, up from 63 GW just one year earlier. About three quarters of those requests come from data centers.
ERCOT's January 2025 Monthly Outlook for Resource Adequacy estimated an 80% chance of rolling blackouts if a storm similar to the deadly 2021 Winter Storm Uri hit Texas again.
The on site gas plant at the Abilene Stargate campus has been authorized to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and 14 tons of hazardous air pollutants annually, according to the Texas Observer.
At the Frontier Campus data center just one county over, energy partner Voltagrid has been approved by the TCEQ to operate 210 industrial gas generators, which emit nitrogen oxides and hazardous pollutants.
From 2000 to 2024 ERCOT peak demand grew 1 to 2 percent per year. The current forecast represents growth roughly six times that rate, almost entirely from data centers.
The grid problem is not theoretical. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri killed at least six people in Taylor County and over 200 statewide. The ERCOT grid failed because demand exceeded supply during a cold snap. Stargate's Abilene campus alone will draw 1.2 gigawatts of continuous load on that same grid. ERCOT is now warning that data center demand is growing faster than new generation can be built, and is asking the Texas legislature for thousands of miles of new transmission lines at a cost projected to exceed $30 billion. Under Texas's existing cost allocation rules, those transmission costs get socialized across all ratepayers. That means your electric bill goes up to pay for the infrastructure being built to deliver power to Stargate.
The air pollution is local and it is unprecedented. Stargate Abilene is being powered in part by a $500 million on site natural gas plant. The Texas Observer reported in July 2025 that the plant has been authorized to emit 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and 14 tons of hazardous air pollutants annually. Nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds, and fine particulate matter from gas turbines are linked by the EPA to increased rates of respiratory disease, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. Harvard's School of Public Health analyzed a comparable on site gas plant for a data center in Virginia and estimated $53 to $99 million in annual health damages, including 3.4 to 6.5 additional premature deaths per year from one single facility. The Harvard researchers found the people most affected were those with high social vulnerability, high asthma rates, and lower household incomes. That is Abilene.
The water story has a catch. Stargate uses closed loop cooling, which is genuinely better than the old open evaporative systems. But the initial fill alone is roughly one million gallons per building, eight buildings on the Abilene campus, plus continuous top offs for maintenance and additional draws during expansion. Across Texas, data centers already in operation use approximately 25 billion gallons of water per year, equivalent to roughly 230,000 American households, according to Texas Monthly. Abilene sits in one of the most drought prone regions of the state. The decision to allow this much industrial water draw was made without a public water impact study being shared with residents.
ERCOT itself is sounding the alarm. The grid operator that is paid to keep the lights on is telling Texas that the current pace of data center growth threatens reliability and shifts costs onto residential ratepayers. When the people running the grid are warning you, listen to them.
In response, the Texas legislature passed Senate Bill 6 in June 2025, which gives ERCOT the authority to curtail large load customers like data centers during firm load shed events. In plain English, when the grid is overloaded, ERCOT can now shut Stargate off before it cuts power to your house. That is good. It is also an admission that the projects were approved before the grid could handle them.