Senate Bill 6 is the 2025 Texas statute that rebuilt how large loads connect in ERCOT. Governor Abbott signed it on June 20, 2025. The default threshold is 75 MW at a single site — the same cut Batch Zero later used. The bill does not itself freeze interconnection. It directs the Public Utility Commission of Texas to write the standards: study process, site control, financial commitment, net metering for co-located generation, and when ERCOT may curtail or disconnect large load under stress.
Implementation is a stack of PUCT projects, not a single order. Interconnection standards, forecasting criteria, reliability and demand-reduction rules, and transmission cost allocation have been moving on separate clocks through 2026. Developers have been underwriting against the drafts, not waiting for a neat effective date.
The first net-metering case
On July 24, 2026 the PUCT issued its order in Docket No. 59220, the first net-metering application under SB 6 for a data-center large load paired with a standalone generator. The commission held that emergency curtailment on the co-located load is not capped by the capacity of the paired behind-the-meter generator. The reliability objective, as the order framed it, is to make the existing generator fully available to the ERCOT grid during transmission emergencies.
That is the operational gate. Co-located load that cannot curtail — including physical disconnection if other methods fail — does not get a free ride on the generator's nameplate. White & Case's note on the order is the citation we use; the docket is the primary.
What SB 6 is not
SB 6 is not the August 2026 Batch Zero pause. The pause is an audit directive layered on top of the statute. The statute is the standing rulebook: Texas will interconnect large load that can be studied, secured, and curtailed, and it will not let co-location socialize reliability risk onto the rest of the grid.
It is also not a completed fee schedule. PUCT interconnection-fee and financial-security rules have been in draft. This page does not treat a proposed dollar-per-MW figure as adopted. When the commission adopts a number, the grade and this explainer both move.
How HD scores it
Large-load tariff and moratorium climate is 20% of the HD Market Scorecard. SB 6 is why ERCOT's climate is no longer an A even before the audit. Combined with time-to-power at 35%, the two Texas factors are 55% of the grade. Curtailment risk sits on the interconnecting customer. Powered land with a contracted, ring-fenced path still clears. Load that assumed unconstrained co-location does not.