Momentary Cessation

Texas just passed a rule that amounts to telling data centers: stop fainting.

The technical term is “momentary cessation,” a nice bit of engineering euphemism for what happens when a data center’s power protection system sees a voltage sag and, to shield the racks of GPUs inside, simply disconnects from the grid. Individually this is sound design. Nobody wants a brownout frying a few billion dollars of accelerators. But ERCOT’s problem is that these systems were all tuned to flinch at roughly the same threshold, so a single disturbance can make several thousand megawatts of demand vanish in the same instant, which turns out to be its own disturbance, arguably a worse one. It’s the grid’s version of every trading algorithm hitting its stop-loss at the same tick: every actor behaving rationally, the system behaving like it got hit by a truck.

So now Texas is requiring “ride-through”: stay connected, absorb the dip, trust the grid to recover. It’s a funny mirror of yesterday’s story about utilities begging homeowners to enroll their batteries and EVs as dispatchable capacity. One asset class won’t participate because nobody asked it to. Another was already wired deep into the system and had to be told, by regulation, to quit unilaterally bailing whenever things got uncomfortable. Same underlying problem, opposite complaint.

Meanwhile PG&E is paying $22 million for a 75,000-acre fire, a number that happens to come out of shareholder pockets this time, not ratepayers’. Small mercy, and a nice contrast in who gets to absorb the cost of infrastructure behaving badly.