Phil King: The Man Who Wrote the Kill Switch

Who is Phil King, and why does the grid author get a Bitcoin page?

Because in Texas the grid author is the mining author, whether or not he ever says the word. King is a Weatherford native – fifteen years a Fort Worth police officer, rising to captain, a Parker County justice of the peace, a Dallas Baptist MBA and a law degree – who entered the House in 1999 and, as a freshman, helped pass the deregulation law that built the market ERCOT runs.^[2][1][3] He chaired Regulated Industries, the House committee over that market, for three sessions.^[3] Along the way he put his name on the two lines of Texas hard-money law before he wrote one of his own: a coauthor of Capriglione's 2015 Bullion Depository and a joint author of Parker's 2019 blockchain work-group bill, the one that died in Calendars.^[4][5] In January 2023 he moved to the Senate and Schwertner made him vice chair of Business and Commerce – the committee every mining and reserve bill of the last two sessions has passed through.^[1][6] The chairman is on Charles Schwertner and Bitcoin; the authors of the two coauthorships are on Giovanni Capriglione and Tan Parker. This is the vice chair who wrote the law the mines live under.

What did King do with the 2023 mining fight?

He voted both sides out and waited two years. On April 4, 2023 his committee sent Kolkhorst's SB 1751 – the 10% cap on miners in paid demand response and the abatement ban – and Johnson's SB 1929 – the 75-megawatt registry – to the floor on the same day, both 11–0.^[7][8] The Senate passed both on April 12; the House kept the registry and let the cap die.^[7][8] Fourteen months later, on June 12, 2024, ERCOT's Pablo Vegas told the committee that peak demand could go from about 85,000 megawatts to 150,000 by 2030, more than half of it data centers and miners, and the Lieutenant Governor said within days there would be no “Wild Wild West of data centers and crypto miners.”^[9] The Senate Research Center's brief for the bill that followed put the number at 130 to 150 gigawatts of new load against a 2024 peak of 86, and its four goals in order: make large loads pay their interconnection costs, protect reliability, make the forecast credible, and make large loads share load shed with everyone else.^[12] The two 2023 bills, and their authors, are on Lois Kolkhorst and Bitcoin and Nathan Johnson and Bitcoin.

What does SB 6 actually do?

Five things, to every load over 75 megawatts at a single site – the same line the 2023 registry drew for mines, now applied to everyone.^[11] Prove the project is real: a flat study fee of at least $100,000, proof of site control, and disclosure of any duplicate request elsewhere in Texas that would change or withdraw this one.^[11] Show the backup: disclose on-site generation that cannot export to the grid but can carry at least half the load, and let the utility pass that to ERCOT.^[11] Run it or cut it: before or during an energy emergency, after every market tool but frequency response is deployed, ERCOT may direct the utility to require the load to run its backup or curtail.^[11][14] The kill switch: a transmission-voltage load interconnected after December 31, 2025 must have equipment that lets it be curtailed remotely during firm load shed.^[11][15] Pay for the wires: ERCOT builds a competitively procured reliability service for large loads – with 24 hours' notice, and closed to any load that curtails in response to price or already sells another ancillary service – and the PUC re-examines how transmission costs are allocated, with a study due December 31, 2026.^[11][16] A load can jump the queue by bringing its own generation within 180 days or by signing a ten-year contract with ERCOT to be a flexible load that curtails on command.^[14] The law as a mechanism is drawn below; how it fits the state's statute-by-statute record is on the Texas Bitcoin law timeline.

How did SB 6 pass?

With a low number and almost no opposition. King filed it February 12, 2025 with Schwertner as joint author and eight coauthors from both parties, including Eckhardt and Alvarado on the left and Creighton and Middleton on the right.^[10] At the February 27 hearing the Sierra Club testified for, one witness against, and the Texas Blockchain Council, ERCOT, the PUC, the utilities, the Data Center Coalition, and Lancium registered “on” – the industry that had organized to kill the 2023 cap did not organize against this.^[13] Business and Commerce passed it 10–0 on March 13, the Senate 31–0 on March 19; House State Affairs, with Representative Ken King as sponsor, 12–0 on May 23; the House 103–25 on May 27, no conference required.^[10][14][15] Abbott signed it June 20, 2025, effective immediately – the same afternoon he signed the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, so that the state took a position in the asset and a leash on the load in one sitting.^[10] The reserve is on the Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve reference; the mines the law now governs are on the Texas mining map.

What happened after it passed?

The rules came, and the queue exploded. The Public Utility Commission opened four rulemakings in the fall of 2025 – forecasting criteria to strip “phantom” load from ERCOT's models, interconnection standards, net-metering review for loads pairing with existing generators, and the demand-management service – and told a national audience in October that the queue held 189 gigawatts of requests, 69% of them data centers, about 40% of the nation's electricity use, and that the Texas Reliability Entity had upgraded “Disorganized Integration of Large Loads” from unlikely to Likely/Major.^[16] By December it was 230 gigawatts against 7.5 connected; by June 2026, 418; by August, 474 – more than five times the record peak of 91,089 megawatts set on July 22.^[17][18][21] In April King told regulators to hurry: “Everywhere we go, people are asking us about data centers and (electricity) costs and all these things. We need to be able to tell our constituents it's getting done.”^[18] On June 10 the Governor directed the PUC and ERCOT to make data centers pay their full infrastructure cost and to lower residential bills, with memoranda due July 17 and 31; King posted the next day that SB 6 was “the nation's first comprehensive legislation regarding data centers” and that he agreed.^[19][20] On August 3 Abbott ordered every project in the queue audited before it could move forward.^[21][22]

The honest counterweight: the switch, the service, and the seven-fold queue

Three things, and the first is the one the industry names. The kill switch is the constraint the miners spent 2023 fighting, enacted for everyone: a mine that interconnects after 2025 can be cut remotely during load shed whether or not it is being paid to power down, and the cooperatives' 2023 ask – shed the mines before any household – is what ERCOT now says it will recommend as a condition on net-metered loads.^[11][16] Second, the service. The reliability product SB 6 creates for large loads excludes any load that curtails in response to the wholesale price or already sells an ancillary service – which is to say, it excludes the way most Texas mines make their curtailment money – and the industry's own trade press reads the law as the state replacing a voluntary emergency brake with an enforceable one just as miners pivot their sites to AI tenants who cannot flex.^[11][23] Third, the queue. The law was written to make the forecast credible; in the twenty months after it passed, requests grew from 63 gigawatts to 474, most of them paper, and the Governor had to freeze the queue to sort the real from the phantom – with a directive that credited SB 6 with “meaningful steps” and then asked for more.^[17][21][19] The data does not even count the mines: ERCOT's large-load reporting excludes cryptocurrency facilities, which sit in the registry Johnson built instead.^[18]

The fair reading, from a site that is bullish on the load he leashed: SB 6 is the best thing that could have happened to Texas mining short of being left alone, because the alternative on the table in 2023 was a cap. A register-and- curtail regime treats a mine as what it is – the most flexible large load on the grid – and asks it to prove that flexibility on command rather than only when the price is right; a mine that cannot do that was never the grid asset the industry claimed. The exclusion from the new service is a real cost and an open question for the 90th Legislature. The queue is not the law's failure but its diagnosis: a $100,000 fee and a site-control requirement are exactly the tools that separate 474 gigawatts of requests from the fraction that will ever draw power, and the audit is those tools being used. The man who deregulated the grid in 1999 wrote its first large-load constitution in 2025. It is not finished, and he has said so.

Where does the King record stand today?

As of September 2026: SB 6 is law and its four rulemakings are in force or pending, the kill switch has applied to every new large interconnection since January 1, the queue is frozen under audit at about 474 gigawatts, and the PUC's transmission-cost study and the agencies' legislative recommendations are due before the 90th Legislature convenes on January 12, 2027.^[16][21][19] King was re-elected in November 2024 with 61.71% and holds Senate District 10 until January 2029, still vice chair of the committee that will write the next large-load bill.^[24][1] The senator who tried to cap the mines is on Lois Kolkhorst and Bitcoin; the one who wrote the registry he extended is on Nathan Johnson and Bitcoin; the lieutenant governor whose position his bill enacted – bullish on the asset, tough on the load – is on Dan Patrick and Bitcoin. This page is the man who wrote the leash.