Energy Secretary Puts Data Center Generators on Call
Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued a four-day emergency order letting PJM, the operator of the power grid from New Jersey to Illinois, run listed power plants beyond normal limits and, as a last resort before blackouts, switch data centers and other big users onto their own generators; hospitals and 911 centers are exempt.
Washington — U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Monday, 12 October, issued an emergency order that lets the mid-Atlantic grid operator call on specific power plants and, if needed, the backup generators that sit behind data centers and other big electricity users, from Tuesday, 13 October, through Friday, 16 October.
The order, No. 202-26-50, rests on section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, a law that lets the energy secretary act when there is a sudden shortage of power or of the plants and lines that deliver it. Wright found that such an emergency exists in the PJM Interconnection region, which covers all or parts of 13 states and the District of Columbia, from New Jersey and Pennsylvania through Ohio, Virginia and parts of Illinois and Tennessee.
What PJM asked for
PJM, which balances supply and demand on that grid, applied on 11 October. It forecast demand at or around 111,500 megawatts or higher on 13 October and said it expected to be within about 900 megawatts of its reserve margin on 14 October, with planned generation outages near 61,591 megawatts and several major transmission lines out of service for autumn maintenance, the order says.
PJM asked for authority to run listed plants above their normal operating limits and to use backup generation at large loads — including hyperscale data centers — instead of taking power from the grid as a last step before cutting ordinary customers, a stage the industry calls an Energy Emergency Alert 3, or EEA 3.
What the order requires
From 13 October, if PJM decides the listed plants are needed, it must dispatch them only as needed to keep the lights on. From the same date, PJM may order backup generators — auxiliary, standby, battery storage or other — to run as a last resort before declaring an EEA 3, or during one. It may tell transmission owners and local utilities to help bring those units online.
The order does not cover backup gear that already protects hospitals, 911 centers, water plants, natural-gas pipelines, defense sites and similar critical facilities. Plants and backups must stay within the times and limits PJM sets for reliability and, as far as practicable, within environmental rules; hours and fuel used under the order do not count toward certain rolling environmental caps, Wright wrote, citing earlier winter-storm orders.
The order runs through 16 October. Reporting duties continue after that. PJM must tell the Energy Department each day which units ran under the order. Wright signed it in Washington on 12 October.
PJM had already recalled generation maintenance outages until noon on 14 October and extended a capacity advisory, its first-stage warning of tight supply, through Wednesday, PJM said. It said further emergency steps may be needed.
On Monday afternoon PJM went a step further. At 3:49 p.m. Eastern time it issued a Maximum Generation Emergency/Load Management Alert covering its whole region for all of Tuesday, 13 October, according to PJM's emergency procedures site. PJM labels it Energy Emergency Alert 1, the first of three steps on the North American Electric Reliability Corporation's grid emergency scale. The notice tells power plant operators that PJM is counting emergency-only generation as available, and asks them to estimate how quickly they could bring units back from planned maintenance. It is an early warning, not a power cut: under the energy secretary's order, cuts to ordinary customers come only at the third step, Energy Emergency Alert 3. PJM had posted no second- or third-step alert as of early Tuesday. In a separate notice the same afternoon, PJM said it had found a reliability need to use the plants listed in the energy secretary's order on Tuesday, adding that the order does not direct them to run at full output.
What it means in practice
For households and small businesses in the PJM footprint, the aim is to avoid rolling blackouts during a short window of high demand and planned outages. For data-center operators and other large customers with their own generators, the order means PJM can tell them to run those machines so the shared grid does not tip into emergency load shedding.
The order does not build new plants. It unlocks existing machines for a few days. Rate recovery for the extra running is allowed under the same statute, the order notes.
What happens next
PJM will decide hour by hour whether to use the authority. If conditions worsen, it can ask Wright to renew the order before it expires on 16 October. Separately, federal energy regulators on 9 October accepted PJM's new definition and registry of "large loads" of 50 megawatts or more — mostly data centers — and rejected PJM's plan to curtail new large loads in emergencies, according to that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order as reported on 9 October. That tariff fight continues; Monday's emergency order is a short-term reliability tool, not a substitute for it.