Texas senators spent Wednesday grilling electric grid officials, national security experts, and industry representatives in an hourslong hearing on how to keep the state’s electric system both secure and affordable amid explosive growth in demand.
Meeting for their first interim hearing, members of the Senate Business & Commerce Committee focused on foreign threats to the power grid, vulnerabilities in the equipment supply chain, and the mounting strain from data centers and other large industrial loads.
Committee Chair Charles Schwertner (R–Georgetown) opened by touting an American Legislative Exchange Council report ranking Texas 10th in electricity affordability, with average retail rates far below the national average. He warned, however, that maintaining that advantage will require tightening protections around critical infrastructure without driving up costs for consumers.
The committee first heard from ERCOT, the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT), and the Office of the Attorney General on implementation of the Lone Star Infrastructure Protection Act and follow-up legislation.
ERCOT officials described a two-track attestation system now imposed on every market participant and interconnecting entity: one disclosure covering corporate ownership and affiliations with China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea, and another covering grid equipment and services purchased from companies linked to those countries.
Entities must provide a five-year lookback on equipment sourcing and update ERCOT every 180 days when they buy covered equipment or services. ERCOT has terminated or referred for enforcement those that failed to respond and says nearly all respondents with foreign ties self-certified they do not grant hostile entities unauthorized access or control over Texas grid assets.
Lawmakers pressed ERCOT on gaps in its initial paperwork, including an “indeterminate” country category that allowed some entities to avoid specifying which of the four targeted nations they were tied to.
Senators questioned why ERCOT did not simply ask, on the front end, whether an applicant came from one of the designated countries and why the state is now chasing those details through follow-up requests.
Sen. Lois Kolkhorst (R–Brenham) laid out several concerns regarding the attestations and supply chain vulnerabilities, particularly with unreliable energy sources such as wind, solar, and battery storage.
“Nobody wants the renewables anyway in their district,” said Kolkhorst. “And now we find out it’s littered with foreign enemy countries.”
Members also focused on whether Texas should more directly integrate federal “do not use” lists—such as a Department of Defense prohibited technologies list—into state rules for grid equipment.
A second panel turned to national security and supply-chain risk.
Dr. Emma Stewart, chief power grid scientist at Idaho National Laboratory warned that Chinese-linked cyber actors have been actively probing U.S. operational networks, including energy systems, and that the real danger lies in the communications and control layers of modern grid devices.
Inverter-based resources such as solar, wind, and battery storage depend on networked controls that are essential for safe operation yet create potential gaps in security. She said studies suggest a large share of key control components worldwide originate from the People’s Republic of China and suggested Texas should “repatriate” technology where possible by replacing foreign firmware and software on imported hardware with trusted code, coupled with contract language that guarantees the right to inspect and test equipment.
Supply-chain experts from the University of Texas highlighted a different chokepoint: large power transformers.
They told senators that transformer lead times routinely exceed 100 weeks and can stretch close to three years, with a significant gap between expected Texas demand and U.S. manufacturing capacity.
A critical bottleneck is grain-oriented electrical steel, much of which comes from Japan and South Korea, while the lone U.S. producer offers costlier medium-grade steel. Because most large transformer plants are located outside Texas, utilities are increasingly pushed toward imports, and major projects—from AI data centers to new industrial facilities—can end up waiting on transformers even when generation is available.
Later panels explored how ERCOT and the PUCT are trying to manage unprecedented queues of both new generation and large loads.
ERCOT reported more than 450,000 megawatts of proposed generation—heavy on solar, storage, and a growing amount of gas—and roughly 410,000 megawatts of proposed large load, much of it data centers.
Officials said the traditional interconnection process is breaking down when dozens of large projects move forward in parallel, leading to situations where fully built facilities discover at the final “energization” study that the grid can no longer support their planned load.
To fix that, ERCOT is developing a “batch” process for large-load interconnections and parallel rules for “bring your own generation” and controllable loads, allowing big customers with on-site power to coordinate with the grid and ramp down during scarcity.
Senators made clear they expect the PUCT to fully implement cost-allocation and large-load reforms before the Legislature returns in 2027, warning that if regulators fall short, lawmakers will reopen and rewrite the rules themselves.
