Where every number comes from

ERCOT's Large Load Working Group and its predecessor, the Large Flexible Load Task Force, each post a monthly status update. It's a slide deck, not a spreadsheet. The real numbers live inside bar and pie charts, not a table you can copy and paste.

We download each deck, turn the slides into images, and read the numbers off the charts by hand. Every deck also shows its own 12-month trend chart, so we can check one month's number against up to 12 other decks. If a number is more than 5% off from what the other decks say, we go back and check the original PDF before trusting it.

There are real gaps in the data. The committee didn't meet or post this deck every single month, especially in the earlier LFLTF era, so several months are missing throughout the history, plus one big gap between October 2024 and January 2026 where nobody posted anything for over a year. We show every one of these as a break in the chart. We don't guess at what happened in between.

ERCOT publishes a monthly report tracking every power plant project waiting to connect: when its studies started, when it signed its agreement, when it got approved to turn on. That's a different queue than the large-load one above (it's power plants, not data centers), but it's the best real measurement we have of how long ERCOT interconnection actually takes. We use it as a stand-in by zone and fuel type.

Each month, we look at ERCOT's wholesale electricity prices by zone going back to 2019: how often prices spiked, how often they went negative, how volatile they were. This is a rough signal for how strained a zone's grid is. It is not a real engineering study of specific power lines or substations. Treat it as a hint, not a verdict.

• No individual projects. ERCOT only publishes totals, not project names, sizes, or exact locations.
• The zone split is rough. The load-side decks only break things into West, North, and "everything else."
• This isn't a forecast. Every number here already happened. Nothing predicts what comes next.
• ERCOT keeps changing its own category names between decks. When that happens, we leave the field blank instead of guessing at a match.