A customer large enough that the grid must study it before connecting, such as a datacenter. Texas sets the line at 75 megawatts, and PJM’s proposal at 50, a line the federal regulator accepted on 9 October 2026, while rejecting the rest of the proposal. Chapter 6.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Defined in Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock.
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 6 — Firm, Around-the-Clock
Where the electricity comes from: grid queues, transformers, turbines and the firm power a datacenter needs every hour of the year, on calendars the buildout does not control.
Where the record uses it
- Person Wright, Chris
Also discussed in
- Person Abbott, Greg
Sources that use it
- Public Utility Commission of Texas, Project No. 59142, Review of ERCOT’s Interconnection Processes for Large Loads, item 52: ERCOT, “ERCOT Updates – Good Cause Exceptions for PGRR 145, Batch Zero Verification and Audit Process, and Community Impact Review Process,” filed 20 August 2026 (16 pp.; ERCOT “has paused approvals to energize large load data centers and crypto facilities until the Batch Zero eligibility verification is complete”, item 52, p. 9; on 3 August ERCOT paused the Batch Zero study and approvals to energize data centers and crypto facilities of 75 MW or greater, “Large loads: 75 MW or greater”, item 52, p. 4, the Commission’s order of the same day, item 53, p. 2, reciting the pause of the study “of loads that are 75 MW or more” until the verification and audit are complete; conditional classification of large loads by 31 August in place of the 7 August deadline, item 52, p. 6; the Batch Zero Eligibility Verification Report, “summarizing the results”, to be filed by ERCOT on 10 December and a Commission open meeting on 17 December, item 52, p. 12; until 11 September 2026 this row carried “5,409 requests totalling 474 GW” — the filing holds neither figure, the 474 GW is the ERCOT Senate deck’s, and the 5,409 is in no opened document; the Commission’s order granting the good-cause exceptions is item 53 of the same day, 20 August 2026, 4 pp., the governing instrument, item 52 being ERCOT’s request; item 54 is a consultant’s comment, not an extension; item 55, ERCOT’s update of 11 September 2026, confirms the 10 December filings and the 17 December open meeting “proceeding on schedule”; the market notice of 3 September, M-A080326-04, calls the classification “provisional”, and ERCOT’s board deck of 11 September uses both words, “provisional” on slide 4 and “conditional” on slides 1 and 5; the same deck, slide 4, puts the energization pause “until the completion of the verification and audit and community impact review”, a wider condition than item 52’s; later filings in the project have rows of their own, item 55 of 11 September 2026 and item 73 of 21 September 2026; the filed documents were read in this project’s public interchange, the PDF pages counted with the filing receipt as p. 1). In the Sources
- Elaine Hart, Sylvan Energy Analytics, “Data centers and resource adequacy in the Pacific Northwest,” presentation to the Oregon Data Center Advisory Committee, Oregon Department of Energy, 29 May 2026 (slide 10, “Large load curtailments in 2030 under January 2024 weather & hydro conditions”: “Low Growth 0 hrs”, “Low Electrification 2.5 - 4.6 days”, “Low Tech 2.3 - 6.2 days”, “Baseline 7.0 - 9.3 days”, the baseline’s datacenter demand “Baseline (3,700 MWa)”; slide 11: “Multiday shortages are very hard to solve with existing clean technologies”; the consultancy’s own modeling, “our results”, and the slides name no funder). In the Sources
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Large load.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/large-load (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-large-load-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Large load}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/large-load},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}