artificial intelligence<\/a> and crypto mining is straining power grids across \u200bthe United States.<\/p>\nUnlike traditional industrial customers, which tend to draw electricity steadily and predictably, data centers are engineered to cut their connection to the grid at the first sign of trouble to protect their equipment and keep services running. That makes them an unpredictable and potentially destabilizing force on grids already under pressure from rising demand.<\/p>\n
Four groups of unnamed \u200clarge electricity users, including data centers, \u2060abruptly disconnected from the Texas grid during a test of how they would handle routine voltage disturbances, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said in a report dated May \u206021.<\/p>\n
When large customers abruptly cut their power use, it can knock the grid off balance and trigger wider outages.<\/p>\n
ERCOT, which manages electricity for most of Texas, said it reviewed about 20 gigawatts of large customers seeking to connect to the system, \u200bincluding \u200beight projects totaling roughly 3.9 gigawatts aiming to start up \u200bbefore July 1. It said it identified four \u200cgroups of large power users that could each trigger more than 5,000 megawatts of demand tripping under certain fault conditions, based on simulations of transmission system disturbances.<\/p>\n
Those abrupt drops in demand were equivalent to the electricity consumption of a large city such as Boston.<\/p>\n
ERCOT said it is reviewing the test failures and drawing up plans to protect the grid from disruptions. So-called voltage ride-through failures have become a top priority for ERCOT\u2019s board as the \u200crisk grows with more data centers and crypto miners connecting to \u200bthe grid.<\/p>\n
Since 2023, ERCOT has identified at least 26 events in \u200bwhich data centers or crypto mining facilities have \u200babruptly disconnected from the grid because they could not handle disturbances in the flow \u200cof electricity.<\/p>\n
In December 2022, a failed transformer at \u200ba substation in west Texas \u200bcaused nearly 400 crypto miners, data centers and oil and gas production facilities to unplug without warning. The mass disconnection produced a surplus of nearly 1,700 megawatts of electricity, about 5% of the grid’s total \u200bdemand, and forced 112 megawatts of \u200cpower generation to shut down, according to ERCOT.<\/p>\n
ERCOT and regulators have been tightening interconnection and performance \u200brequirements, including new rules aimed at ensuring such facilities can ride through voltage and frequency disturbances \u200bwithout disconnecting.<\/p>\n
(Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Tim McLaughlin June 5 (Reuters) – Several large data centers and crypto facilities planning to connect to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5304,112500,3413,27,29,28,19673],"class_list":["post-324389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-data-centers","tag-electricity-consumption","tag-ercot","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news","tag-texas-power-grid"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}