He paused the grid. He did not pause the water.
Governor Abbott has ordered the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT to audit every data center in the grid connection queue, and says no project moves forward until that audit is done. Headlines are calling it a moratorium on data centers in Texas.
It is not. It is a moratorium on one permission, and it is not the permission that threatens this lake.
Why this falls short
The letter went to the two agencies that control electricity. A data center that builds its own gas generation does not need them.
Nothing in the directive touches the permissions that actually decide whether a hyperscale facility gets built next to a reservoir:
Water. Raw water from Cedar Creek Lake comes from TRWD. The Governor did not write to TRWD.
Air permits for gas turbines. That is TCEQ. Also not on the letter.
Land and construction. There is no zoning in unincorporated Henderson County. Buying acreage and grading it needs nothing from ERCOT.
Tax abatements. Negotiated locally, still moving.
The Governor has spent two months telling developers to bring their own power. A developer who takes that advice can keep buying land, keep negotiating for our water, and keep permitting turbines straight through the audit. We asked for a high bar. Right now it reads like a fast lane.
What we need from you: letters, this week
We are not asking the Governor to cancel the audit. We are asking him to widen it into a real moratorium before the scope hardens. Letters land hardest in the days right after an announcement, while nobody in Austin has decided yet what the pause covers. That window is open now. It will not be open in September.
The one sentence to send him
“If a data center cannot get a power connection during your audit, it should not be able to get a water contract, an air permit, or a tax abatement either. Pause all of it, publish what you find, and tell us when the pause ends.”
Two minutes. Our page asks you a few questions and builds a letter that sounds like you, not a form letter. If you write your own, better still, please copy savecedarcreeklake@gmail.com so we can count it. Volume is the argument.
We rebuilt the Tell Abbott page for this
Everything you need is on one page, updated today. It lays the audit out side by side: what it covers, what it leaves open, and the four things to ask for. Then it writes the message for you.
On the page
The four asks. Widen the pause to water, air permits, and abatements. Publish it project by project and set an end date. Make the five-part standard an enforceable rule. Write it into law.
A message builder. Name the project near you, say how it plans to get its power, check which of the Governor’s own standards it fails, add a sentence in your own words. Staff sort identical form letters into one pile. Yours will not be in it.
A phone script. Updated for the audit. Under a minute, and the office logs calls by subject.
Now the part that is genuinely good
Read why the Governor says he did this. His letter points to data center operators who failed to comply with a state survey measuring their water and power usage, a survey required under the state budget, and to recent legislative hearings on how these facilities affect municipal water supplies and the neighborhoods around them.
We know what that looks like from the inside. We spent fourteen months asking one developer how much water it intended to pull out of this lake and never got a straight answer. We got county filings, water district agendas, and neighbors who noticed survey stakes. The state is now pausing an entire industry, in part, because developers would not answer the same question we were asking.
And the disclosure list is stronger than we expected. Every tax abatement and dollar of public assistance. Annual and peak power projections plus real progress on on-site generation. Projected peak water consumption, its source, and how the cooling system works. Full ownership and controlling interests, so we find out who is behind an LLC. And under community impact: noise controls, setbacks, lighting mitigation, and traffic management.
Setbacks and noise. Everyone who stood up at the Oran White Civic Center and explained what 150 feet from a property line on Mankin Road or Ruth Springs Road actually means should read that twice. It is in a state disclosure requirement now. Nobody in Austin was asking about setbacks or cooling water in January.
How much does the pause actually delay?
Less than you would think, even on the grid side. ERCOT is tracking more than 1,800 projects representing over 474 gigawatts, more than five times the grid’s all-time record for peak demand, and roughly 90% of new power requests come from data centers. In June the PUC approved a new way to handle that pile: instead of studying projects one at a time, ERCOT studies them together in a statewide group called Batch Zero. It has a published calendar.
ERCOT’s Batch Zero calendar
Neither ERCOT nor the PUC has announced a deadline for finishing the audit, and the binding megawatt decisions were already most of a year out. So the honest test is not whether the Governor stopped a groundbreaking this fall. It is whether the August 7 notice goes out on time. If it slips, the pause has teeth. If it lands on schedule as though nothing happened, we will know what the audit is worth. Watch that date with us.
One more thing to watch on August 7
July 10 was the deadline for projects to get into Batch Zero by filing their studies and documentation. On August 7, ERCOT tells each one how it was classified. One classification is base load: projects that already completed individual studies get modeled into the system rather than put through a fresh reliability evaluation and megawatt allocation. Nobody outside ERCOT knows yet who lands there. If the furthest-along projects come out the least examined, that is the opposite of what the headlines promised, and all of us should be able to see the list.
Read it yourself
The Governor’s directive and letter to the PUC and ERCOT, Office of the Governor. The survey non-compliance and the full disclosure list are in the letter itself.
Texas data center projects must stop until the state audits them, The Texas Tribune
PUC approves ERCOT’s Batch Zero process and the batch process explainer, ERCOT, June 18. Every date above comes from ERCOT, not from us.
We are not going to tell you this is nothing. Six months ago the state had no position on data center water use at all. Now it is auditing more than 1,800 projects and asking about cooling systems, setbacks, and noise. Communities did that.
But we have watched this pattern before. A strong announcement, a quiet process, and a shovel in the ground in a county where nobody was watching. The reason the Key Ranch project is not moving forward today is not that a rule saved us. It is that neighbors read the fine print and showed up.
Reading the fine print this week means noticing that the pause has a hole in it shaped exactly like our lake. Take two minutes and ask him to close it.
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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit coalition of lake residents, business owners, and Henderson County neighbors. Volunteer-run · No paid staff.
savecedarcreeklake.com · savecedarcreeklake@gmail.com
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