Texas Regulators Kept Moving Data Center Permits After Abbott Ordered a Halt, Watchdog Report Says

On Sept. 21, Gov. Greg Abbott told the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to stop. A new watchdog report says the paperwork kept moving.

The oil and gas watchdog group FracTracker Alliance, working with Public Citizen, identified 35 permitting actions the TCEQ took on data center projects in the weeks after Abbott’s order, Inside Climate News reported Monday.

"TCEQ has continued reviewing applications and issuing approvals that allow data center development to proceed," the groups said. "These actions do not signal an agency trying to pause."

Abbott’s office and the TCEQ did not immediately respond to Inside Climate News.

What Abbott ordered

In his Sept. 21 letter to TCEQ executive director Kelly Keel, Abbott directed the agency "to halt all permits sought by data centers" while the state studies their effects on water and the electric grid. "No other state agency shall move forward with regulatory approvals related to data centers until this information is acquired," he wrote.

Abbott has described the pause as a chance for state agencies to measure what data centers mean for water supplies and grid stability before more approvals go out. We covered that permit freeze as its first deadline arrived Monday.

What the report found

According to the permitting documents the groups collected, since the letter the TCEQ has:

Fast-tracked or assigned engineers to 14 permits. Approved stormwater coverage for 11. Certified emissions estimates for seven. Issued public notice for three.

Most of the permits are for gas-fired power plants built to feed data centers, Inside Climate News reported. All of the largest gas power projects now proposed in Texas are meant to serve data centers, mostly for artificial intelligence.

Those projects are large. According to the permitting documents, they would release tens of thousands of tons of regulated pollutants and more than 100 million tons a year of greenhouse gases, which Inside Climate News compared to the annual emissions of a mid-sized industrialized country.

The day after Abbott’s letter, on Sept. 22, the groups found that the TCEQ mailed notices of preliminary approval to three major projects: NRG’s Prairie Energy Center, VoltaGrid’s ABI-1 power plant and Nexus’s self-powered data center in Hubbard. Public comment periods opened on two of them in the following days.

The report also lists stormwater approvals after Sept. 21 for Caldwell Valley Technology Park in Caldwell County, Crusoe’s Abilene campus and EdgeConneX’s Cedar Creek campus. In another case, the TCEQ received a permit application for generators at Edged Energy in Dallas on Oct. 6, and an engineer finished an initial review on Oct. 9.

"Our research uncovered glaring inconsistencies between regulatory actions and Governor Abbott’s directives," said Sam Law of FracTracker, the report’s author.

Reading it fairly

FracTracker and Public Citizen oppose much of this buildout, and readers should weigh the report with that in mind. Some of the steps it counts, such as assigning an engineer or certifying an emissions estimate, are routine. They are not the same as final approval to build. The TCEQ may also argue that some steps were required by law or deadline. It has not yet said.

Still, the governor’s words were plain: halt all permits. If the agency read that order narrowly, Texans deserve to know why. Businesses deserve a clear answer, too. Developers weighing billions of dollars in Texas projects need to know whether a pause means a pause.

Why it matters for business

Data centers have become one of the biggest economic stories in Texas, bringing construction jobs and tax base along with heavy demand for power and water. Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office has sent letters to 156 data center projects over water reporting. And Abbott, as the Tribune has reported, has taken about $9 million from data center-linked donors even while pushing to rein in the industry.

The governor ordered a pause so the state could gather facts. Now the first set of facts on the pause itself is in. The next move belongs to the TCEQ and to Abbott.