Picture a couple who sell the house in Ohio and buy a ranch-style place outside San Antonio. One story, no stairs, a big porch.
Their first August there, the grid operator asks everyone to ease off the air conditioning during the afternoon peak. They do. The house hits 81 degrees.
Nobody mentioned that the move came with a seat in a very crowded room.
3.8%
Growth in Texans 65 and older in a single year, the fastest of any age group
5+ years
Typical wait from a grid request to switching on new power, in regions with data
438 GW
Power that big users, mostly data centers, have asked Texas’s grid to connect
The cohort is arriving on a schedule. So is the demand. The supply is the slow part.
A new power plant takes years to plan, permit and connect. A data center can go up faster than the power it needs. That gap is where the next decade of Texas electricity gets decided.
Some of the work is happening before anything is built. Companies are lining up land, fuel and permits now, then selling the finished paperwork to whoever needs power first. One of them is open to small investors.
Here is what that means at the kitchen table. When the big new users and the retirees want power at the same hour, the grid has to choose.
On the worst afternoons, the grid operator asks households to conserve. A 2025 Texas law also lets it cut off the biggest new users in an emergency. Either way, the summer runs tight.
Where the cohort’s money sits this quarter, and where the move south fits.
So who is already standing there? Not the power plant. That fight belongs to the giants.
Look smaller, at the driveway of a one-story house in a new 55-plus subdivision.
The honest catch is the price tag. A whole-house generator runs well into the thousands installed, and it covers outages, not the higher monthly bill. Plenty of families will decide the porch and a fan are enough.
The longer fix is more power, and not all of it has to come from gas. Engineers are now drilling miles down to tap the heat inside the earth. It runs day and night, no fuel, no sunlight required.
The arithmetic
Texans 65 and older grew 3.8% from 2023 to 2024, faster than any other age group since the start of the decade: U.S. Census Bureau data, via The Texas Tribune, June 26, 2025. About 438 gigawatts of large-load interconnection requests tracked by ERCOT as of late May 2026: New Project Media, June 23, 2026, citing ERCOT. Time from grid request to commercial operation exceeding five years for recent projects, in regions with data: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up 2026, July 1, 2026. Texas Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025, lets the grid operator curtail very large new loads during emergencies.
Next summer’s grid outlook for Texas comes out in the spring. Before then, find out whether your utility has ever asked you to cut back, and on which days. That list is your real place in line.
Andrew
Boomers Trade is written by someone getting older right alongside you, and watching who profits from it.
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