El Paso Electric's Schedule 27 and SWEPCO's ES-LL Contract: What It Means for AI Data Center Siting in Texas

Facilities with 75 MW or more of annual peak demand fall under El Paso Electric's new Schedule 27 High Load Factor Large Power Service, requiring an annual load factor of at least 85 percent, or SWEPCO's proposed Electric Service – Large Load Contract, applicable to any customer with 75 MW or more of contract capacity at one facility or in aggregate.

Named Projects Already Underway

Policy Update, 1 October 2026

On 21 September 2026 the governor directed TCEQ and every state agency to halt data centre permits and approvals until a PUCT and ERCOT audit of projects seeking connection is finished; there is no fixed end date. ERCOT is tracking about 474 GW of large-load requests, roughly 90% of them data centres. The governor has said he will seek repeal of the data centre sales tax exemption and other incentives in the 2027 session, but the exemption is still law. The SCR AI Build Configurator now models a 42-month queue for Texas, up from 30.

Figures compiled from the Edison Electric Institute's "Large Load Projects and Tariffs" (September 2026) member-company summary and public regulatory filings. Confirm current tariff terms directly with El Paso Electric / Southwestern Electric Power Company (AEP) and the relevant state public utility commission before relying on any figure for a capital decision.

Weighing Texas against another state or a Canadian province with a different rate and interconnection picture entirely? Run both sides of the comparison through our licensed AI data center cost configurator — it applies each jurisdiction's actual power rate, tax treatment and large-load tariff rules to the same seven build configurations.

Between El Paso Electric’s Schedule 27 and SWEPCO’s ES-LL contract, Texas large-load pricing varies a lot by utility territory — our own crypto data center in BC runs under a single province-wide rate instead.

Model This State on Your Own Site

Every figure above comes from the same power-cost and tariff dataset behind the SCR AI Build Configurator — a licensed, embeddable widget that models seven data center build configurations against all nine Canadian provinces and all 50 US states plus DC, returning capital expenditure by line item, energy cost, revenue by commercial structure, EBITDA and payback.

Not ready for an annual licence? A one-time Site Screening Report ($950, one site) runs the same model for a single build without embedding anything.