Nobody Was in Charge of Saying No

On August 12, data centres in Northern Virginia invoked contract clauses written for hospitals to refuse an emergency curtailment order during a grid crisis. Brownouts rolled through Loudoun County. Schools lost power. The engineering held. The governance didn’t.

Pola Rees speaks with Marcus Reeves, a grid operations dispatcher at the Mid-Atlantic Interconnect Authority who was on console when the order went out, and who watched 400 megawatts of expected demand reduction vanish behind legal exemptions he had no authority to override.