The Second-Largest Merchant Firm-Gas Queue Is in the Plains

The Plains rarely come up in the data-center power conversation, which is mostly about ERCOT, Northern Virginia, and the Gulf. But on the deliverable test applied to every ISO, gas that is merchant, signed, and in service by 2028, SPP holds about 2.0 GW of firm gas. That is second only to ERCOT, and more than PJM (0.7 GW) and MISO (0.4 GW) combined.

Small in absolute terms, notable in relative terms

Two gigawatts is not a large number. What makes it notable is the contrast: a wind-dominated market quietly holds more contractable near-term firm gas than the markets that get all the attention, concentrated in Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.

Like MISO, SPP is a market of vertically integrated utilities, so most of its firm build runs through the utility rather than a merchant field. But its queue reads more cleanly, because SPP marks executed interconnection agreements explicitly. The 2.0 GW is that subset, the fully executed, merchant-style positions, not the broader utility resource-plan build.

What this changes for the buyer

Data centers. Oklahoma pairs cheap land, existing gas, and a real if small near-term firm-gas set. It will not carry a multi-gigawatt campus alone, but it is a credible secondary market most site searches skip. One detail worth getting right: the Texas Panhandle sits in SPP, not ERCOT, so it is a different queue and a different market when you compare Texas options.

Developers. A signed, near-term gas position in Oklahoma is scarcer than the Plains' low profile suggests. As the marquee markets tighten, secondary firm-gas positions gain option value.

Methodology

The 2.0 GW deliverable figure is reconciled from SPP's public generator interconnection queue (the active-queue CSV export): gas with a fully executed interconnection agreement, on schedule, not yet in commercial operation, and a 2026 to 2028 commercial operation date. It is Tafel Power's filtered estimate, not an SPP-published category. Figures reflect an early-2026 snapshot and may have changed since.

All data compiled by Tafel Power from public sources. Framing informed by the firm's transaction advisory work in ERCOT and cross-ISO markets.