On July 26, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed an order declaring a statutory emergency across the Southwest Power Pool, covering both of the grid operator’s balancing areas — its entire footprint. 

On August 4, with the heat still hanging on, he extended it through August 10, this time narrowed to SPP’s western area only. That extension is in force right now.

SPP runs the grid across a 14-state corridor stretching from the Dakotas through Kansas and Oklahoma, west into Colorado, New Mexico and the Texas Panhandle, and east into Missouri and Arkansas.

What went wrong

Three problems collided in late July. The heat pushed demand higher. Wind and solar output was expected to fade heading into the evening peak, right when electricity use tops out. And an unusually large number of generators were down for repairs.

SPP escalated step by step. It issued a Resource Advisory for its eastern area on July 18 and again on July 24, and a Conservative Operations Advisory for its western area on July 19, extending that one daily through July 24. DOE issued a two-day emergency order on July 20 for the western area. When SPP said the heat would last through August 3, the department came back with the broader order.

What the order does

Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act gives the Energy Secretary broad authority during a power emergency. That includes ordering plants to run beyond emissions limits they would otherwise be legally bound to follow. This order authorizes two distinct things.

First, it identifies a list of plants, called Specified Resources, that must run when SPP needs them, even if doing so pushes them past federal, state or local permit limits. DOE did not publish a capacity total, but adding up the exhibit yields about 3,900 megawatts: Colorado Springs Utilities units, Platte River Power Authority’s Rawhide station, and a large block of Tri-State units, including the Craig and Laramie River coal plants. 

A July 31 update added roughly 900 megawatts in Nebraska and Missouri. Those units sit in SPP’s eastern area, and the updated exhibit is labeled for the July 26 order — whether they carry into the current western-area-only extension isn’t stated in the documents.

Second, and more interesting, SPP can order privately owned backup generators to run — the diesel gensets and battery systems behind the meter at data centers, factories and large commercial sites. The order explicitly names hyperscaler facilities. Those machines were installed to keep a building alive when the grid fails, not to support the grid itself. Now they have become a federal reliability resource.

There are guardrails. Backup generation is a last resort: SPP can use it only just before or during an EEA 3, the alert level where a grid operator has run out of options and is preparing to cut power to firm customers. Hospitals, 911 centers, air traffic control, water treatment plants and gas pipelines are excluded. Emissions produced under the order do not count toward rolling-average permit limits, and SPP must tell DOE every day which units used the exemption.

The part nobody is saying out loud

Here is the tension: the order treats data centers as emergency capacity at the same moment SPP is preparing to absorb a staggering amount of new data center demand.

Evergy signed 1.9 gigawatts of data center contracts in February with Google, Meta and Beale Infrastructure. The utility says another 2 to 3.5 gigawatts is already in advanced discussions. Its capital plan rose 24 percent, to $21.6 billion.

And these projects are no longer theoretical. Google is building a $10 billion campus in Kansas City’s Northland, its second in the area. Meta broke ground in Tulsa in April. Beale is building a $3 billion campus in De Soto, Kansas. Google has a gigawatt-plus co-located project under construction in the Texas Panhandle. Oklahoma alone has more than a dozen projects somewhere in the development pipeline.

In Nebraska, meanwhile, Google has proposed a facility drawing 1,000 to 3,000 megawatts — more than three times Lincoln’s entire summer peak — paired with a privately built Tenaska gas plant instead of ordinary grid supply.

SPP knew this wave was coming. It created an accelerated interconnection pathway for large loads, and FERC approved it, specifically to manage the volume.

What to watch

Emergency orders are supposed to be rare. DOE has issued three for SPP in roughly two weeks, and the current one is already an extension of the last. If the pattern continues into September, it will tell us more about the condition of this grid than any forecast can.