As of June 2025, ERCOT was tracking approximately 156,000 MW of large loads seeking interconnection — compared with 63,000 MW in December 2024. In six months, the queue grew by roughly two and a half times.
That figure comes from ERCOT's own monthly report, and it is worth sitting with for a moment. Large loads — data centers, industrial electrification, crypto mining, hydrogen production — are asking the Texas grid for more than twice the capacity they were asking for half a year earlier. The Texas Legislature took the growth seriously enough to pass Senate Bill 6 in the 89th Regular Session, signed 20 June 2025, directing the Public Utility Commission to write new rules for how loads above 75 MW interconnect, curtail, and pay for the system they are joining.
Storage is how Texas absorbs it
A grid taking on load at that rate does not solve the problem with generation alone. Solar and wind arrive when the weather decides; large loads arrive when the facility decides. Batteries are the reconciliation layer, and ERCOT has been building them faster than anyone. Installed battery capacity reached 14,137 MW by July 2025, and batteries set a new generation record of 5,794 MW that June, then exceeded 7,000 MW weeks later. Of the roughly 420,000 MW sitting in ERCOT's generation interconnection queue, more than 177,000 MW is battery storage — the largest single category.
The direction is not in question. Texas is going to keep installing lithium iron phosphate at scale, because it is the cheapest reliable way to make a grid with this much intermittent generation and this much sudden load behave itself.
The part that does not get priced
Every one of those megawatt-hours is cathode active material. An LFP cell is mostly, by value, the engineered powder inside it — lithium iron phosphate, particle-size-controlled, carbon-coated, manufactured to a specification that took real energy and real capital to achieve. Building hundreds of gigawatt-hours of storage means sourcing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of that powder.
Today, the overwhelming majority of it is made overseas. And when a Texas battery reaches the end of its service life, essentially all of the cathode material leaves the state — when it is recovered at all. LFP is the chemistry the recycling industry is least equipped to handle economically, because unlike nickel-cobalt cathodes, its value is not in scarce elements that pay for their own recovery. Its value is in the structure. Conventional recycling destroys exactly the thing worth keeping, then pays again to rebuild it.
So the flow runs one direction: material in from abroad, material out of the state at end of life, and a replacement order placed overseas to start the cycle again. That works while the fleet is young. It works considerably less well when the 2020–2023 build vintage reaches its first warranty wall between 2027 and 2030 — which is to say, at the same moment the load growth above is demanding the most new storage Texas has ever built.
The other direction
There is a version of this where the material stays. Spent LFP cathode can be repaired rather than dismantled: the crystal structure restored, the lithium replenished, the carbon coating rebuilt, and the original particle morphology left intact. What comes out is cathode active material at manufacturer specification, made from atoms that are already in Texas, for a grid that is in Texas, sold to manufacturers who increasingly need to prove their material did not come from a foreign entity of concern.
That is the business RETTAB is in. The load growth is not our thesis — it is ERCOT's data. Our thesis is narrower: the batteries answering that demand will need cathode material, the fleet already installed will start giving cathode material back, and right now there is no facility in Texas connecting those two facts.