Kyle Turpin, Manager for Energy Policy and Reliability Standards at the American Public Power Association, has been selected as a member of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation’s standard drafting team for new reliability standards associated with large computational loads.
As computational loads such as data centers proliferate across the North American electric grid, the need to establish regulatory requirements for computational loads has become imperative to ensuring grid reliability.
NERC has spent the past year studying the unique characteristics of computational loads and assessing how regulatory requirements might be updated to ensure grid reliability during major disruption events.
NERC published a report outlining the specific risks that computational loads pose to electric grid reliability and recommending changes to existing reliability standards—these reliability standards are regulatory requirements that all entities who are registered with NERC must follow.
NERC recently authorized a team to draft the first set of these reliability standards that will define a framework in which computational loads may be regulated and establish a “bridge” reliability standard to cover near-term risks while future reliability standards are developed.
The scope of the project gives wide latitude to the drafting team to determine what may be included in the regulatory framework as well as the “bridge” reliability standard—further details are not available at this time, though NERC aims to complete these action items by the end of 2026. While this drafting team works on the “bridge” standard, NERC’s Large Load Working Group will continue its work on better defining computational load characteristics, which will be used to inform reliability standards in the coming years.
