A FOIA led me to an energy conference with some grim news. Original photo by rodclementphotography. Source: Canva.

“So what do they do if things get worse?” I asked the source. They shifted uncomfortably.

“The emergency order allows PJM to tell data centers to run their backup generators,” they said.

“You mean the diesel fuel everyone hates?” I asked, thinking about the environmental activists who bring it up at every turn.

“Well, either there’s no power, or Virginians can breathe smoke,” they told me, shaking their head. “State laws be damned.”

I stared at them in disbelief.

Last week was unseasonably warm for October. I remember getting dressed that morning: a fitted purple sweater dress, no tights, since it was such a beautiful day. (I hate tights anyway.) I threw on a brown fall blazer and figured that when it hit the mid-80s that afternoon, I’d just take it off.

I was excited about the weather. The people who run our electric grid were panicking.

Warm weather meant people were about to turn on their air conditioners.

And the grid operators needed what they didn’t have at that moment, power.

Fall is usually a slow season for electricity, so power plants had gotten permission to shut down their boilers for maintenance. PJM says about 61,000 megawatts of generation was offline. People were inside the boilers cleaning them out, while the roughly 67 million people who rely on this grid were unknowingly turning on the air.

PJM, the organization that runs the electric grid across 13 states and D.C., needed those workers out and those plants back on. Immediately. But that was an impossible request.

So PJM declared a low-level emergency, and the U.S. Department of Energy issued an emergency order covering the region where I live. And because everything kept working, everyone went about their day hardly noticing we were in a state of emergency. Even I missed it.

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My mind was racing with other questions. The week before, I’d received a document dump, records I’d requested from the state government months ago, because I wanted to understand what was going on with these data centers. Funny enough, several people on one of the email chains were going to be at an energy conference that week. So I decided to meet them in person.

While there, I learned that two significant things had happened.

On October 9th, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the federal agency that oversees the grid, accepted part of a plan from PJM. It approved a definition of a “large load” (50 megawatts or more at one site, the state definition is 25 megawatts but that is besides the point) and a registry to track data centers coming onto the grid.

But FERC threw out the heart of the plan, a compromise the better part of a year in the making. It would have let PJM cut power to new data centers first in a grid emergency, so everyone else, including hospitals, wasn’t put at risk.

“Either unplug the data center or the hospital could lose power,” they explained. “The feds said no.”

“Why? Why not?” I asked.

Part of FERC’s reasoning was about who’s in charge. The commission said deciding who gets cut off first belongs to the states, not a regional grid operator.

Four days after that decision, we were in an energy emergency. So the DOE gave PJM a different option. If the emergency got bad enough, PJM could tell data centers to switch to their backup generators, most of which run on diesel.

“How often are these emergencies happening now?” I asked.

“There have been more energy emergencies in the last year than the last ten years combined,” they said, matter-of-factly.

(PJM has an app, PJM Now, if you want to track usage.)

…

It took me a while to wrap my mind around the whole thing.

States in this region share one interconnected grid. Some, like Maryland, have to, because they don’t produce enough electricity for their own residents. They pull power from states that make more than they need, like Pennsylvania. Then there’s Virginia, the data center capital of the world, adding data center after data center to the grid. Some pull as much power as entire cities. The energy people kindly call them “large loads.”

So FERC says the hard choices belong to the states. But this is an interstate problem, and no single state can solve it alone. PJM, the one entity that sees the whole grid, doesn’t have the authority, as FERC just reminded it. Meanwhile, the federal government wavers on data center regulation, or on a stance of any sort.

And the builders keep building.

One of the people I met at the conference compared this moment to the end of Thelma and Louise. The two of them are racing toward the edge of a cliff, smiling, wind in their faces, hair tangling behind them. They’re about to die and they floor it, knowing exactly where the road ends.

I want to say they were exaggerating. But I don’t know.

Updates!

You all get to hear it first! I have a deal! I am working with a publisher to bring you a book. I am not going to get ahead of the announcement with details, but let’s just say this is all pretty surreal. It’s insane to think that I had an idea a year ago, put it on paper and one of the largest publishers in the world wants to bring it to life. More to come!

So far, I’ve really enjoyed writing Worth Mentioning. It’s fun to share parts of conversations that don’t make it into stories but are still worth discussing. Let me know what you think. I read everything.

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Worth Mentioning by Jenny Abamu

Virginians can breathe smoke