Data Centers Pose Threat to Electric Grids, US Regulator Says
(Bloomberg) -- Big data centers connecting to power grids is now one of the greatest near-term risks to reliability, according to a rare warning by the US agency charged with overseeing the sector.
The sprawling campuses responsible for AI and cryptocurrency mining are being developed at a faster pace than the power plants and transmission lines needed to support them, “resulting in lower system stability,” said the North American Electric Reliability Corp. in a report Thursday. That’s because data centers require tremendous amounts of power at unpredictable intervals, and are also sensitive to swings in grid voltage — making them a major wild card in a electricity system that’s unprepared for such energy use.
About 1.5 gigawatts of data centers tripped offline in Northern Virginia, the world’s data center capital, last July and then another 1.8 gigawatts this past February because of voltage issues, Mark Lauby, NERC’s chief engineer said at a conference last month. Outages of those sizes can have ripple effects across the rest of the grid.
“A loss of load of this size is comparable to a large nuclear power plant coming on-line immediately and unexpectedly, creating an imbalance due to too much generation on the system,” NERC said in its annual state of reliability report.
There is an urgency to figure out how to integrate data centers smoothly because the US is still in the early innings the AI boom, which has been deemed by Washington as a national security imperative. While the agency said better models are needed to understand how data centers use electricity, it concluded that batteries are proving helpful to keeping the grid stable.
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