Small detail from an op-ed today that I can’t stop thinking about: two Base Power customers, eight miles apart, same battery, same installer, same model of house. One got permitted online in an afternoon. The other, presumably, did not — the piece trails off before the punchline, but you can guess the shape of it, because it’s the same shape as every permitting story. The bottleneck was never the battery. It’s whichever city building department happens to be reviewing the paperwork that week, each with its own private theory of what counts as an approved backup power system. FERC can restructure PJM’s governance all year and none of it touches this. The transition, it turns out, is mostly a few thousand municipal clerks.

Meanwhile, a number I’ve been waiting for finally showed up. All month, Utility Dive ran a slow drumbeat of op-eds insisting flexibility “works” and the only problem is getting people to use it. Today Southern Co. reported contracted large load climbing to 17 GW, including a 3.2 GW OpenAI data center near Savannah — and buried in the release, 1 GW of that contract is flexible demand response for peak shaving. First time the company has gotten a data center customer to agree to it. Not a pilot, not a white paper. An actual hyperscaler signing up to be curtailed.

Two different scales of the same problem: the grid doesn’t get built by policy, it gets built one permit and one contract clause at a time.

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