Kardashev Labs · ERCOT
Site Clearance

How the grade is made

Methodology

You draw a search area. We tell you whether that MW looks strong, mixed, or weak on public interconnection and price history — and we show the knobs.

This is not an ERCOT interconnection study. If someone treats the grade as an IA result, they are wrong. We built a screening tool, not a study shop.

The short version

  1. Clip to Texas counties

    Your polygon has to stay inside Texas. We intersect it with Census county shapes. Anything that spills into Mexico or out of state gets rejected.

  2. Pull the county queue

    GIS filings name a county, not a lat/lon pin. So pending projects and MW come from whole counties that make up enough of your search area (tiny edge clips stay on the map, drop out of the grade).

  3. Stack timelines + prices

    Peer screening→energization medians for the dominant CDR zone / fuel, plus trailing LMP stress for the mapped load zone. Those three inputs vote. Wire physics and SCED curtailment do not — yet.

Geography, without the fairy tale

ERCOT’s public generator queue is county-resolution. Midland County is not a point on a map; it is a polygon with every pending project that listed “Midland.” If your search covers 60% Midland and 40% Martin, both counties can feed the score, and the map paints the overlap so you can see what we counted.

We do not invent project pins from bus names or substations in v1. When we can geocode POIs honestly, the map will get sharper. Until then, county is the honest unit.

What enters the grade

Queue pressure

Pending (never energized) GIS projects and MW in scored counties, from the latest GIS Report.

Peer timelines

Measured medians from ~97 months of GIS history. Browse the same series on our timelines tool.

Market stress

Trailing-year negative-price hours, RT volatility, RT−DA spread for the mapped LZ_* load zone. CDR labels like COASTAL map to the nearest published series.

What stays out (on purpose)

  • Wire / power-flow stressPhase C. Public-model OPF scenarios are not in the grade.
  • SCED curtailmentResource-level 60-day disclosure not ingested yet.
  • Large-load project pinsERCOT does not publish them. Load mode is coarse zone context — see LLWG.

Sources

Everything we score on is public. Click through if you want the filings, not our summary.