Markets

The same question runs through every market: how much firm gas can a large load actually contract, and how. The answer splits on market structure. In energy-only, merchant ERCOT, the interconnection queue is a real supply signal. Its September 2026 report holds 10.3 GW of signed, near-term merchant gas, our strict screened floor of merchant projects with a signed interconnection agreement and near-term operation. Weighted by observed completion rates, the same queue holds about 20 GW, against a headline nameplate of 79.1 GW. Elsewhere, after checking who owns each project, merchant signed, near-term gas is about 1.1 GW in PJM, almost all of it one Indiana plant whose date may slip to 2029, and close to zero in SPP and MISO, where the signed gas belongs to utilities and public power. Utilities build through resource plans, and PJM leans on its existing fleet and capacity auction, not new queue positions.

Read the interconnection queue in Texas. Read the utility everywhere else.

See the ERCOT gas queue reconciliation and methodology.

Outside the seven ISOs, utilities hold about 184 GW of existing gas, more than any organized market, mostly across the Southeast, Florida, the desert Southwest and the Mountain West. That capacity is mostly utility-owned, so a data center reaches it through the utility on a regulated timeline, not through a merchant queue. It is one reason Georgia is among the hottest data-center destinations, and it does not appear in any queue.

Signed, near-term gas is Tafel Power's filtered estimate from each ISO's own queue (signed interconnection agreement, in service 2026 to 2028, merchant), not an ISO-published category. ERCOT's queue names developers. For SPP, PJM and MISO we checked each project's owner against interconnection agreements, ISO study reports, EIA-860M and state filings (October 2026); projects whose owner could not be established are left out and noted on each market page. For ERCOT, the 10.3 GW floor and the ~20 GW completion-weighted figure are from the September 2026 queue report; the weights are observed completion rates from LBNL project-level outcomes, not ERCOT-assigned probabilities. Other markets are from queue files of September and October 2026. Existing and planned gas are from EIA-860M, August 2026.