[Note: Another excellent analysis by Doug Sheridan here. Doug is one of the most astute commentors on energy matters posting at LinkedIn today. If you aren’t following him there, you are missing out.]
Harvard University and Ercot have little in common at first glance. One's an elite university; the other a grid operator serving 90% of Texas. While both manage overwhelming demand through an application process, only one's honest about what those applications mean.
Harvard received roughly 48,000 applications for this year’s freshman class, expected to be around 1,750 students. That means demand is about 27 times the number of available spots. Yet exactly no one believes Harvard is at risk of being “overrun” by freshmen this fall. The school understands most applicants will never meet its standards, and its leadership never suggests otherwise.
Ercot has a similar system. Data‑center developers file interconnection requests for the power their proposed projects will need. As widely reported, these requests now total 474 GW—almost five times ERCOT’s all‑time peak demand and eight times its typical daily load. The figure is dramatic. It's also deeply misleading.
A Harvard application costs $85. An Ercot interconnect request requires no fee—only documentation signed by the applicant. Both are screened by people whose job is to reject unqualified applicants. And both institutions know that only a fraction of applicants will ever be accepted.
About 4% of applicants end up attending Harvard, and about 10% of Ercot's interconnect applicants reach commercial operation—the share of data centers will likely be far less. Ercot, along with the state’s regulated utilities, controls precisely when those projects can connect.
Here's where the similarities end.
Harvard doesn't encourage the public to believe that 48,000 new students are about to descend on its campus. Ercot, its regulators and many elected Texas officials have allowed the opposite impression to take hold—that data centers are poised to overwhelm the state’s grid with demand that will never realistically materialize. The result is a narrative that's misled markets, spooked the public and distorted policy debates.
The fact is both institutions have a handle on how many of their applicants are qualified. Both also know roughly how many will ultimately be accepted. But only one behaves as if the gross number of applications tells the real story.
To wit, Texas Gov Greg Abbott has ordered a halt of Ercot's interconnection process under the premise that data centers represent a serious threat—despite limited evidence they do. We note that Texas has never halted applications to drill for oil and gas statewide, even amid fierce criticism of fracking. Yet data centers are being cast as a grid‑toppling menace.
It all fits a broader pattern in energy and politics today: metrics divorced from system realities, incentives that reward exaggeration and officials who allow narratives to outrun facts.
Transparency and truth from public officials shouldn't be optional, especially for a system this important. Texans deserve better than manufactured panic and opaque governance.
Are we wrong?
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