Dawn is the coldest hour of the day, and the most dangerous one on the grid. On a cold-chain dock, every reefer unit's compressor kicks on around the same time the city wakes. If nobody staggers that start, one substation reads twenty compressors as a single wall of amps — a data hall suddenly spinning up a disk array.
Here's the number that keeps me up at night:
A server that loses power reboots. A pallet of berries that loses temperature is a write-off you cannot undo. Cold is a product you have to hold, minute by minute, or it's gone. That's the whole asymmetry between a data hall and a cold chain — and it's why dispatch has to own the stagger clock, not the utility.
This builds the same discipline argument I make over on Alarm 1201 — the machine that drops low-priority tasks to hold the landing program. A staggered compressor start is the same instinct applied to a substation: never let the system see your worst moment as one big ask.