[gurchik]

> This seems ... pretty old school as well.

This doesn't surprise me. One of my projects as an intern was to generate reports from public data from ERCOT and a few other North American ISOs (organizations that control a region's power grid). Some of them are happy to reply to a basic cURL request. Others are more particular about things like your user agent or cookies set (even sites that didn't require authentication would set a cookie on first load and would reject requests to certain pages without that cookie). A few were very particular and ran some Javascript code to serve requests that made it so something like Selenium was required.

It was a bit surprising to me how many hoops we had to jump through considering this is public data that tax payers are entitled to.

If I recall correctly PJM was the best to work with because they had a well-designed REST API and provided a developer guide with sample code.

> I don't see anything that would _really_ be drain on those ERCOT resources...

I'm not sure if these controls are in place to safeguard against abuse. Most people don't even know these companies exist and I doubt they get too many requests. I'm assuming this is just a symptom of software sold to the lowest bidder.