Large data centers in North America are about to become registered entities with their own reliability obligations. On 15 October NERC announced that the standards package of Project 2026-02, Computational Loads, passed its final stakeholder ballot. It now goes to the NERC Board of Trustees, which is expected to take it up this quarter, and then to FERC. FERC's order of 16 July requires NERC to file the initial standards and registration criteria by 31 December 2026.
Who Is Covered
The rules apply to sites with at least 50 MW of connected computational load served at 100 kV or above. NERC had first proposed 20 MW and 60 kV and raised both after comments, POWER reports. On 8 October the NERC board created two new registration categories for them: Computational Load Owner and Computational Load Operator. According to Microgrid Media, the Data Center Coalition asked for exclusions for sites where the owner has no contractual or practical control over the equipment; the final text does not include them.
Three New Standards
- CLO-001-1 covers interconnection studies, commissioning and modelling data, including ride-through capability and equipment tripping. Models have to be updated within 180 days of a hardware, software, firmware or setting change that alters the site's dynamic response.
- CLO-002-1 covers operating data and communications. Operators must follow instructions from their transmission operator, balancing authority or reliability coordinator, unless an instruction cannot be carried out physically or would breach safety, equipment, regulatory or legal limits; in that case they must say so.
- CLO-003-1 covers coordination of protection settings, sequence-of-events recording on specified breakers, and fault and dynamic disturbance recording.
FAC-001 and FAC-002 are revised so interconnection requirements are not duplicated. Owners and operators generally get 12 months for the data, instruction and communication duties, protection coordination starts after 9 months, and existing sites get 36 months to install the recording equipment. Minimum voltage and frequency ride-through requirements are not in this package; NERC is writing them separately.
The Event Behind It
NERC points to July 2024, when successive faults in the Eastern Interconnection led to the near-simultaneous loss of about 1,500 MW of data center load. Frequency rose to 60.053 Hz and came back within four minutes, and NERC traced the trips to protection and controls on the customer side. It also reviewed 26 events at ERCOT crypto-mining sites between January 2023 and September 2025, each a drop of more than 100 MW. A Level 3 alert in May listed essential actions, but those were not mandatory.
For the engineers of a data center, this moves the electrical design from a private matter to a reported one. When a grid fault arrives, the UPS and transfer scheme decide whether the site rides through or leaves the grid and runs on batteries and its generators. Those settings will now have to be modelled, recorded and kept current, and a later change to them is a reportable change. The standby generator plant is part of that picture; when the site leaves the grid, those engines carry the whole load.
Sources: POWER Magazine, Microgrid Media
