The emergency instrument has expired. The permanent one is still mid-clock. Nobody has yet answered who pays. That gap — between the tool that curtailed data centers during the heat and the rule that would replace it — is now a dated fact rather than a forecast.

The paper's July 7 account of how the emergency orders were expiring before FERC made them permanent said the original PJM backup-generation order "expired July 3." That was true but incomplete, and the correction matters. Order No. 202-26-33 — the Department of Energy's last-resort authority under Federal Power Act Section 202(c) to route large loads, including data centers, off the grid during the heat emergency — did expire at 11:59 p.m. ET on July 3. But the same day DOE extended it as Order No. 202-26-33A, effective through 11:59 p.m. ET on July 7. [1] Two related dispatch orders — 202-26-32A and Duke Energy's 202-26-34 — expired late on July 6. [1] So the emergency curtailment authority did not end on July 3. It ran four more days and lapsed overnight into today.

That makes July 8 the first day the emergency authority is fully gone. What survives is a single regulatory clock. On June 18, FERC opened Section 206 show-cause proceedings directing six grid operators — PJM, MISO, SPP, CAISO, NYISO, and ISO-NE — to justify or reform how they price large-load interconnection, with responses due August 17. [2] The reserve-margin question — how much firm capacity the grid must hold, and who funds it — outlived the emergency tool. The permanent replacement is a set of tariff filings that are not yet due.

During that gap, no binding instrument answers who pays. FERC's docket is deliberate, not fast: the commission has said it needs more time on its own jurisdiction, in part because it has been buried under some 3,500 pages of comments. [3] Utility Dive frames the show-cause orders as orderly reform — six takeaways, an August deadline, cost-transparency concerns flagged for later. [3] On X, the same facts read as queue-jumping: data centers demanding firm power, getting emergency backstops, and leaving households to carry the reserve margin.

The two instruments differ in kind, not just in date. A 202(c) order is emergency executive authority: the Energy Secretary can command a grid operator to keep or dispatch generation, or to route a large load off the system, when reliability is at genuine risk. It is fast, blunt, and temporary — it expires by design, and the July orders did. A Section 206 proceeding is the opposite: slow, structural, and permanent once concluded, because it rewrites the tariff that governs who pays for interconnection. The emergency tool answered the heat. It could not answer the bill. Only the tariff can, and the tariff is not yet written.

The scale of the pending question is why the docket moves slowly. FERC has said it needs more time even to fix the boundaries of its own jurisdiction over large loads. [3] The reliability side is moving faster than the cost side: the North American Electric Reliability Corporation issued a Level 3 alert on integrating large loads, an "essential action" notice to industry — a signal that the grid's own standards-setter treats data-center interconnection as a present risk, not a future one. The show-cause orders force the six operators to answer a single question by August 17: is the way you currently price large-load interconnection just and reasonable, or must it change? A defense of the status quo and a reform proposal are both permitted responses. Which they choose is the whole game.

The paper's middle is the instrument itself. A capacity price is a cost-allocation fact, not a market curiosity, and data-center load has already driven more than $13 billion in additional PJM capacity costs across a 13-state, 67-million-person footprint. The DOE order could curtail a data center in an emergency; it could not decide whose bill absorbs the buildout. FERC's August docket might — if the six operators file binding cost-allocation reform rather than defending the status quo as just and reasonable. Until then, the record is a lapsed order and a pending clock, with the reserve margin sitting on ratepayers by default.

Whether DOE reopens the emergency authority if another heat wave hits, and whether the roughly $13 billion in data-center capacity cost shifts back toward the loads that caused it, are the two questions the August filings will begin to answer. Neither is answered today. Today there is only the gap.

-- DARA OSEI, London