That sounds minor. It is the opposite of minor, and the reason runs straight through the documents Dynawatt tracks.

Go back to the evening of July 10, 2024, in the stretch of Northern Virginia the industry calls Data Center Alley. A lightning arrestor failed on a 230-kilovolt transmission line. The protection system did exactly what it was built to do, clearing the fault and attempting to reclose, several times in quick succession. Six faults flickered across the system in eighty-two seconds, each lasting a fraction of a second. That should have been a non-event.

Instead, roughly 1,500 megawatts of load vanished from the grid almost instantly. Around sixty data centers across two dozen substations saw the voltage dip and did precisely what they are designed to do: they cut themselves off and flipped to backup power to protect their servers. No utility shed that load. The customers shed themselves. Much of it stayed dark for hours.

Here is why grid engineers lost sleep over it. For a century, the nightmare scenario was losing supply. A power plant trips, and the system is planned and drilled to absorb the loss. Losing a gigawatt and a half of demand in an instant is a different animal, and the grid was never built for it. Drop that much load at once and voltage and frequency swing in ways the system isn’t tuned to catch. The circuit that protects a data center’s silicon can put everyone else’s power at risk.

Now multiply it. ERCOT alone has logged dozens of these load-loss events from large computing facilities in recent years. Dominion, the utility serving Data Center Alley, reported roughly 40 gigawatts of contracted data-center power by late 2024. The 1,500-megawatt scare was a rounding error against what’s coming.

This is the context for the items in Dynawatt’s feed that look like bureaucratic noise. ERCOT’s Large Load Working Group grinding through batch interconnection studies. A line about “electronic load ride-through.” NERC standing up an entirely new category of regulated entity, the Computational Load Entity, for any site over 20 megawatts. None of it makes headlines. All of it is the grid rewriting its rulebook so that the next time a fault hits Data Center Alley, the loads ride through it instead of bailing out. The demand everyone counts in gigawatts is the easy part. Teaching it to behave is the hard part, and it’s happening in working-group slide decks almost nobody opens.

While one stack of filings re-engineers the demand, another shows what’s lining up to feed it. Read the CAISO interconnection queue across the last two weeks and the answer is monotonous. Solar paired with batteries. Batteries on their own. Centennial Flats, Athos, PLUM, Darden, Umbriel, Wingtip. Project after project, the same shape: variable generation plus storage, trying to behave like firm power.

Then watch what left. In a single week, four projects over a gigawatt each withdrew from the CAISO queue. Two of them were exactly the kind of firm, dispatchable capacity that an around-the-clock load needs most: a combined-cycle gas plant and a 1,300-megawatt pumped-storage project. They walked out. The solar-and-battery hybrids kept walking in.

So here is the bet the system is placing, in plain terms. A new kind of load, large and twitchy enough to make the reliability regulator issue its rarest alarm, is being matched with a new kind of supply that is intermittent by nature and leaning on batteries to fake firmness. Maybe it works. Storage is improving fast and the economics keep getting better. But it is a bet, and the interconnection queue is where you can read the odds before anyone announces them.

This is the part of the AI-and-energy story the loud coverage skips. There is a whole genre now of maps with angry pins, organizing neighbors against the data center down the road over water and noise. That work has its place. It is not this.

Dynawatt reads the filings. The queue withdrawals, the NERC alerts, the working-group decks, the tariff dockets spread across seven grid operators in seven incompatible formats. That is where the signal lives, and it is almost always months ahead of the headline. The job is to tell you what the people who actually run the grid are worried about, in their own documents, without an agenda about whether any of it should get built.

The demand was never the interesting question. The demand was always coming. The question is whether a grid engineered to survive the loss of its largest power plant can survive loads that disconnect themselves by the gigawatt, and what’s queuing up to keep the lights on while it figures that out. The filings are already answering. Most people just aren’t reading them.

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources (NERC alerts and reliability filings, the ERCOT Large Load Working Group, ISO/RTO interconnection queues, and FERC and Federal Register filings). It is informational, non-advocacy, and not investment advice.

Dynawatt is a weekly brief on the collision now reshaping the American power system: demand for electricity from AI and data centers is growing faster than the grid can add supply, and the gap is being negotiated in real time — in interconnection queues, working-group filings, and tariff proceedings that rarely surface in the headlines.

This brief reads those primary sources so you don’t have to. Each week it surfaces the most consequential developments in large-load interconnection, generation buildout, and the rules being written to govern both — compiled from public ERCOT, ISO/RTO, and federal filings, in a plain, non-advocacy register. The aim is signal: what happened, and why it matters to anyone building, financing, or planning around grid capacity.

It is informational, independent, and not investment advice. This inaugural issue covers the last seven days.

Large-load & data-center

⚡ ERCOT updates LEL-SSO power-variation framework; proposes three regulatory options

ERCOT presented updated guidance on managing sub-synchronous oscillations caused by AI training loads’ rapid power fluctuations, which can stress synchronous generators and cause shaft fatigue. The framework quantifies maximum continuous terminal variation (MCTV) per location; ERCOT is now soliciting industry feedback on three compliance models — project-specific limits, tiered/hybrid, or system-wide uniform caps — to balance interconnection speed, flexibility, and grid stability.

ISO: ERCOT · Type: Large Load · Stage: Rule-change · State: TX

Source

⚡ ERCOT studies 2-second LEL reconnection time, finds better grid stability

ERCOT evaluated voltage ride-through requirements for large electrical loads, testing reconnection times of 1 vs. 2 seconds post-fault across scenarios with 15.2 GW baseline load and up to 19.2 GW under higher-load conditions. Results indicate 2-second reconnection improves frequency settling and rate-of-change-of-frequency trends, supporting the NOGRR282 compliance framework for data-center and industrial loads.

ISO: ERCOT · Type: Large Load · Stage: Study · Capacity: 19.2 GW · State: TX

Source

⚡ ERCOT Large Load Working Group charter approved by TAC

ERCOT’s Large Load Working Group charter received Technical Advisory Committee approval on April 23, 2025, formalizing governance and operational procedures for coordinating hyperscale data-center and AI-compute load integration into ERCOT’s system planning and interconnection processes.

ISO: ERCOT · Type: Large Load · Stage: Rule-change · State: TX

Source

Grid, generation & regulatory

Atlas Complex: 3,200 MW solar + storage enters CAISO queue (La Paz County, AZ)

A 3,200 MW hybrid solar and battery storage project, Atlas Complex, has entered the CAISO interconnection queue in Arizona’s La Paz County — among the largest hybrid entries this cycle.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 3.2 GW · State: AZ

Jove Solar: 2,000 MW solar + storage enters CAISO queue

Jove Solar, a 2,000 MW photovoltaic-plus-storage hybrid in La Paz County, Arizona, has entered the CAISO interconnection queue, positioned to support California’s constrained summer-peak environment.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 2.0 GW · State: AZ

Angeleno Solar Farm: 1,150 MW hybrid enters CAISO queue

A 1,150 MW solar-plus-storage project in Los Angeles County has filed its initial interconnection request with CAISO — a major transmission-addition request amid rising state solar and storage targets.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 1.1 GW · State: CA

Windwalker Offshore: 1,000 MW offshore wind enters CAISO queue

Windwalker Offshore, a 1 GW offshore wind project in San Luis Obispo County, has filed a new interconnection request (Queue ID 1750), underscoring continued developer interest in offshore wind despite permitting and supply-chain headwinds.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Wind · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 1.0 GW · State: CA

Bouse Solar + Storage: 1,000 MW hybrid enters CAISO queue (La Paz County, AZ)

Bouse Solar and Storage Plant, a 1,000 MW hybrid combining photovoltaic generation with battery storage, has entered the CAISO interconnection queue (Queue ID 2052), adding significant seasonal and diurnal balancing capability.

ISO: CAISO · Type: Hybrid · Stage: Queue-entry · Capacity: 1.0 GW · State: AZ

Dynawatt is an independent brief compiled from public sources (ERCOT Large Load Working Group, ISO/RTO interconnection queues, FERC & Federal Register filings). It is informational, non-advocacy, and not investment advice.