Reference

Appendix A — Scope, Methodology, and Limitations#

This report is a synthesis of the public record on large-load grid integration as it stood in early July 2026. It draws on primary regulatory instruments (FERC orders and dockets, NERC alerts and guidelines, ERCOT protocol revisions, PUCT rulemakings, and state commission decisions) and on secondary analysis from law firms, market monitors, research institutions, and trade press. Where a figure originates in secondary reporting rather than the underlying filing — several of the capacity-cost and demand-forecast numbers do — it is presented as reported, and a reader relying on it for a transaction should confirm it against the source document. Five limitations are worth stating plainly. First, this is a fast-moving area: at least six of the proceedings discussed have filing deadlines inside the next sixty days, and the RTO show-cause responses due August 17, 2026 will materially change the picture. Second, the ERCOT queue and forecast figures are the subject of active dispute even within ERCOT, and the report treats them as indicative of magnitude rather than as settled quantities. Third, several figures illustrate schematically rather than measure — Figures 4 (event reconstruction), D1 and D2 (illustrative national demand and composition), and T2, T4, and T5 (illustrative traces and envelopes) are labeled as such and should not be read as data. Fourth, the Assessment boxes are the author's analytical judgment, not neutral summaries of the record; they are labeled and confidence-tagged, and the concluding note preserves the open questions rather than resolving them. Fifth, and most important for anyone quoting a number from this report: load-growth and queue figures in this field frequently mix metrics that are not comparable — five-year versus ten-year horizons, FERC Form 714 filings versus augmented “headline” totals, raw queue volume versus probability-weighted forecasts, and different vintages of the same series. This report attempts to use consistent series and to flag the distinction at the point of use (see Figure D3 and Section 1, where the widely-quoted “128 GW” 2024 figure is separated from the 67 GW FERC-714 value it is often conflated with). A reader carrying any single number out of context should first confirm which metric, horizon, and vintage it represents; a prior version of this report itself conflated the two Grid Strategies series, which is precisely the error this note exists to prevent. The report does not cover several adjacent topics that a fuller treatment would include: water and environmental permitting, community and land-use opposition, the security (NERC CIP) posture of gigawatt-scale loads, and interregional transmission expansion under Order No. 1920. These are noted here so their absence is understood as a scoping choice rather than an oversight. Readers who want the engineering layer beneath the main argument — electrical architecture, load behavior, planning studies, modeling, and forecasting assumptions — will find it in the Technical Annex.

Three registers run through this report, and the distinction matters for how much weight each statement carries. Cited fact rests on a primary instrument, or on reporting of one, and is sourced in the reference block for the section where it appears. Interpretation sits in the Assessment boxes, each carrying an explicit label and a confidence tag. Between them lies synthesis: statements in the body that connect several cited facts into a finding — for example, that queue integrity precedes cost allocation rather than running parallel to it. Synthesis of that kind represents the author's reading rather than a sourced claim, and the text marks it with conditional language (“appears”, “suggests”, “on current evidence”) wherever it moves beyond what the citation establishes. A reader checking any single statement should be able to place it in one of the three.