What If You Had to Verify Before You Build?

Here is a sentence worth sitting with: a data center that fails to answer questions about its power, its water, and its public money “will be denied connection to the Texas grid.”

Not fined. Not reviewed later. Denied connection, before the thing is built.

That is Governor Greg Abbott’s office, in August, directing the state’s utility commission and grid operator to conduct a full verification and audit of every data center trying to connect to the Texas grid — and to complete it before any of them moves forward. The scale makes it hard to overstate. ERCOT is weighing roughly 474 gigawatts of connection requests, more than five times the state’s record peak demand, and about ninety percent of the new requests are data centers.

For months the same sequence has repeated across the country. A project is announced. Commitments accumulate — land, turbines, permits, tax deals. Only later do the hearings and the disclosure arrive, once most of the decision is already hard to reverse. I’ve argued before that this timing is the deepest part of the problem: participation after commitment is not the same as participation before it.

Texas has just tried to run the sequence in the other order.

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What Texas Is Actually Asking

The questions themselves are not exotic. They are the questions every one of these fights keeps running into.

Is the project paying its own way, or leaning on state and local money — tax incentives, grants, abatements, public assistance of any kind? Is it bringing its own power, or drawing on a grid that is already straining? Is it bringing its own water and reusing it, or taking water the surrounding communities rely on? What is it doing about the noise, the light, the traffic, and the emergency burden it drops on its neighbors? And who, exactly, owns it?

What is new is not the questions. It is when they are being asked, and who has to answer before anything proceeds.

The mechanism is real and it is specific. ERCOT’s formal request went out on September 14, aimed at projects of 25 megawatts and up. The answers are due October 12, under notarized attestation. A public report follows no later than December 10. And the instruction that set it all in motion carries a consequence: the audit “must complete before any data center project moves forward,” and any project that fails to comply “will be denied connection to the Texas grid.”

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The Other Order

Put this next to the record I’ve written about before, and the difference is structural.

In Memphis, the bargain was struck behind non-disclosure agreements, the turbines were running before the permits existed, and the public process arrived after the commitment. In Minnesota, the state genuinely legislated first — it built the cost rules before the wave landed — but those rules still had to be run by small local governments sitting across the table from billion-dollar companies, and some of them failed badly enough that courts had to step in.

Texas is attempting the third arrangement. It is not legislating after the fact, and it is not leaving the sequencing to whoever is at the table. It is placing a verification checkpoint before the point of no return — before interconnection, before the grid has committed to the load — and giving that checkpoint teeth.

That is, on its face, the fix. Not slower. Reordered. The questions get asked while they can still change the answer.

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Two Gaps, Only One Moved

Here is where the record stops cooperating with the tidy version.

When I wrote about this timing problem, I kept two things separate, because they fail differently and they fix differently. The information gap is what becomes hard to reverse before affected people have reliable, verifiable information about what is happening. The standing gap is what becomes hard to reverse before they have a meaningful way to influence the decision, even once they know.

Texas has moved one of them. The information checkpoint is now upstream. The grid operator and the commission will know, before interconnection, whether a project is paying its own way, whether it is taking community water, who owns it. That is a genuine change, and it is the first time a state has put it there.

But the second gap has not obviously moved. The questions run from a grid operator to a developer. The community is not a party to them. The public report arrives in December — after the answers have been collected, not while the answers are still open to influence. An RFI is a request for information. It is not a seat at the table.

So the honest read is this: Texas moved the information gap upstream and left the standing gap where it was.

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The Gate Is Real. What It Decides Is Not.

There is one more distinction that keeps this from being either a triumph or a failure, and it is the difference between answering and being stopped.

“Denied connection” is the penalty for not answering. It is not, so far as the record shows, the consequence of answering badly. Nothing in what Texas has published says a project that discloses heavy reliance on public money, or heavy use of community water, will be turned away. It says the project must disclose.

That may sound like a small difference. It is the whole difference. A gate that forces truth before commitment is one thing. A gate that forces a particular answer before commitment is another. The first closes the information gap. The second would begin to touch the standing gap — because it would mean the substance of the answers, not just their existence, shapes who gets to build.

Which of the two Texas has built is exactly what the next few months will reveal.

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The Question to Watch

The answers are due October 12. The public report lands by December 10.

When it does, we will learn the thing that actually matters, and that we do not know yet: whether any of the disclosures change anything. Whether “paying your own way” becomes a condition of connecting. Whether a project’s water use, once on the record, affects its approval. Whether the public report gives anyone a voice before the next commitment, or simply documents the commitments after they have been made.

That is the test. It is not a test Texas has passed. It is a test Texas is the first place to actually run.

The instinct is right, and it deserves to be said plainly: verify before you build is the correct order, and for months it has been the order almost no one used. But verification is only the first of the two gaps. Reorder the information and you have done half the job. The other half is who gets a say before the decision hardens — and that is not a question an RFI can answer.

Verification is not standing. A state can learn everything about a project before it connects and still leave the people who will live beside it with no voice in whether, where, and how it is built. Texas has clearly moved the first. This new process does not clearly move the second.

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Dale Joseph is the author of Thought Partners: Preserving Cognitive Sovereignty in the Age of AI and founder of the Emergence Institute. He worked for years as a consultant helping install hospital networks before turning to writing and systems thinking. He lives in Boynton Beach, Florida.