Two grids, same date, two different ways of getting surprised. July 22: ERCOT hit its new unofficial peak, and a report out today has Texas demand climbing toward 120 GW by 2030 — except the analysts think it’ll actually undershoot ERCOT’s own forecast, because turbine shortages and multi-year build timelines can’t keep pace with the interconnection queue. Same day, up in PJM territory, 3.8 GW of load in Northern Virginia tripped offline all at once. Largest such event in the grid operator’s history. Different failure mode, same week’s date, and PJM is now looking at requiring “ride-through” standards for data centers and crypto miners, so a whole neighborhood’s worth of demand doesn’t vanish mid-afternoon like someone hit a breaker.

I keep turning over how familiar this problem is. Wind and solar spent a decade earning their way onto the grid partly by proving their inverters wouldn’t trip during a voltage sag — ride-through was the toll booth. Now it’s the loads’ turn to pay it. A data center yanking gigawatts on and off is, electrically, not so different from a wind farm doing the same thing in a storm. The grid doesn’t distinguish between a disturbance on the generation side and one on the consumption side, it just knows something enormous moved too fast.

Meanwhile Virginia handed down something concrete instead of another complaint filing: Dominion now has to directly bill new data centers for the substations and lines built to reach them, which knocked the average residential rate hike from $2.90 a month down to 94 cents. A month of reading “advocates say cost allocation is unfair” and here, finally, someone just fixed the allocation.

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