Inside the substation that AI is waiting on
Twelve minutes inside a Virginia switchyard, with the engineers who decide what gets connected and when.
The switchyard at Aldie sits behind three fences, and the third one is electrified. Inside it, on a Tuesday morning in July, four engineers are deciding what gets connected to the grid this year.
The decision does not look like a decision. It looks like three people at a folding table with a laptop and a printed one-line diagram, arguing about whether a particular breaker can carry fault current from a source that does not exist yet.
This film follows that argument for twelve minutes. It is not a documentary about artificial intelligence, though every question in it is downstream of the same buildout. It is about the specific and unglamorous work of connecting one thing to another thing safely, and about the small number of people qualified to do it.
The engineers agreed to be filmed on the condition that nothing in the footage would identify the specific interconnection under review. Meridian agreed. The technical discussion has been left intact.
Filmed at a transmission substation in Loudoun County, Virginia, over two days in July 2026.
Dana covers electricity markets, interconnection policy, and the physical constraints on American growth. She joined Meridian in 2021 after six years at a regional utility desk.
