The flood of data centers signaling interest in Texas keeps growing to ever more impossible heights, prompting questions and anxiety about how the state’s power grid can keep up.   To manage this growth, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas is debating a proposal to incentivize data centers to bring their own power generation, or reduce their power usage any time the grid operator tells them to. In exchange, ERCOT would promise a faster grid connection. view article

Eight years of federal forms filed by the Barbers Hill Education Foundation show it returned just 3 percent of monies it received to the Barbers Hill Independent School District. A specialist suggests the district is using the foundation to evade the state’s “Robin Hood” recapture system.  This information was gleaned from Form 990s that the foundation, a nonprofit organization, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. Texas Scorecard reviewed forms filed for the years 2015 to 2021, and 2023, comparing total contributions and grants received in a given year with grants given back to the district. There was no 2022 filing available on the IRS website. view article

   Talia Natterson is a sophomore at Crossroads School for Arts & Sciences, a private school in Los Angeles, California. She writes for her school publication, Crossfire.