What passed on October 14
NERC, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, writes the reliability rules that owners and operators of the power grid must follow. On October 15, 2026, NERC said its industry members approved a package of rules for computational loads in a final vote. Utility Dive A computational load is electricity used by servers, storage and networking equipment, which covers AI data centers and cryptocurrency mines. NERC proposal summary The package holds three new standards, CLO-001-1, CLO-002-1 and CLO-003-1, plus changes to two existing interconnection standards. POWER
The rules are not in force yet. NERC’s board must adopt them first. Then the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the federal agency that oversees NERC, must approve them. That commission’s July 16 order requires NERC to file the rules by December 31, 2026. Snell & Wilmer, American Public Power Association
Which sites the rules would cover
As reported from the final ballot text, the standards reach a site with at least 50 megawatts of total connected load. The site must also be fed through equipment connected at 100 kilovolts or more. POWER NERC first proposed 20 megawatts at 60 kilovolts and raised both numbers after public comments.
On October 8, NERC’s board also approved two new registered roles, the Computational Load Owner and the Computational Load Operator. Daily Energy Insider Those roles matter because NERC rules bind only the entities that appear on NERC’s registry. NERC primer
Who has to do what?
The rules split the work among the site, the utility and the grid planners. A planning coordinator is the body that studies how a regional grid will behave years ahead. Under CLO-001-1, it and the transmission planners would study each new site and each major change to an existing site. POWER The planning coordinator would also publish its own list of which changes count as major.
The utility that owns the lines would write the interconnection requirements, meaning the technical terms a site must meet to connect. The site owner would supply model data on how its equipment trips, rides through and recovers after a grid disturbance. Ride through means staying connected during a brief voltage or frequency dip instead of dropping off. The owner must show that its model still matches the equipment within 180 days of a change that alters how the site responds.
Under CLO-002-1, the site operator would have to follow operating instructions from the grid operators that run the local system in real time. The only exceptions are an instruction that cannot physically be carried out, or one that would break safety, equipment, regulatory or statutory requirements. POWER An operator that cannot comply must tell the grid operator. The text does not list a tenant contract as an exception, which matters for shared sites where the operator does not control tenants’ servers.
Under CLO-003-1, the owner would set its protection settings in coordination with neighboring equipment. Fault recording would fall on whoever owns the main transformer feeding the site, which may be the utility. POWER
| Item | Before | Under the proposed rules |
|---|---|---|
| Who registers with NERC | Large loads were not registered | Owners and operators of sites at 50 megawatts and 100 kilovolts |
| Model data | No NERC duty on the site | Owner must provide and verify it |
| Grid operator instructions | No federal duty for the site | Operator must follow them with narrow exceptions |
| Fault recording | Not required at load sites | Required, placed on the transformer owner |
| Minimum ride through | None | Still none in this package |
When the duties would start
The duties would begin in phases after approval. Planning coordinators would get three months to define major changes. Site owners would get nine months for their study and data duties. Economic Times Owners and operators would get twelve months for the communication and instruction duties. Sites already running would get 36 months to install recording equipment, and protection duties would start after nine months.
The package sets no minimum ride through performance. A separate NERC working group has drafted a request to write those limits, and it notes that no current standard sets one for computational loads. NERC draft request NERC owes the commission a work plan for its next set of computational load rules by March 2027.
Tomorrow’s topic
Loudoun County’s vote on pausing data center decisions for up to a year.