Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers could be bumped off grids during emergencies

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania – With the explosive growth of Big Tech data centers threatening to overload American electricity networks, political decision -makers carefully examine a solution of difficult love: bump eager energy data centers during electrical emergencies.

Texas first moved, while state legislators try to protect residents in the Data-Center access point from another deadly panel panel, such as the winter storm in 2021 on the death of tens.

Now, the concept emerges in the Middle Atlantic network at 13 states and elsewhere, as massive data centers are in line faster than power plants cannot be built and connected to the grids. This has aroused a repression of data centers and Big Tech, for whom a regular diet is vital.

Like many other states, Texas wishes to attract data centers as an economic boon, but it is confronted with the challenge of responding to the huge volumes of electricity that centers require. The legislators adopted a bill in June which, among other things, orders standards for power emergencies when public services must disconnect large electric users.

This, in theory, would save enough electricity to avoid a wide failure of breakdown on the handful of days during the year when it is the hottest or coldest and energy consumption pushes the grids to their limits or beyond.

Texas was the first, but it will not be the last, say the analysts, now that the beginnings at the end of 2022 of the OpenAi chatgpt have triggered the global demand for chatbots and other generative AI products which generally require large amounts of computing power to train and function.

“We are going to see this kind of things appear everywhere,” said Michael Weber, engineering professor at the University of Texas specializing in energy. “The flexibility of the data center will be expected, required, encouraged, mandated, whatever.”

Indeed, Grids cannot follow the number of rapidly growing data center projects in Texas and perhaps 20 other states while the United States participates in a race against China for the superiority of artificial intelligence.

Grid operators in Texas, the States of the Great Plains and the Atlantic Middle region have produced breathtaking projections showing that electricity demand in the coming years will increase, largely due to data centers.

A proposal similar to that of Texas has come out of the largest network operator in the country, PJM Interconnection, which manages the Atlantic Middle Grille which serves 65 million people and hot dots of data centers in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The CEO of the Southwest Power Pool, which operates the network which serves 18 million people mainly in Kansas, Oklahoma and other states of the large plains, said that it had no other choice than to extend energy reduction programs – probably for the greatest power users – to meet growing demand.

The proposals arise at a time when electricity bills at the national level increase rapidly – twice the inflation rate, according to federal data – and growing evidence suggest that the invoices of certain regular Americans increase to subsidize the gargantuan energy needs of the great technology.

Analysts say that the construction of power plants cannot follow the growth in the data center and that something should change.

“The burden of the data center has the potential to overwhelm the grid, and I think it is about to do so,” said Joe Bowring, who directs Analytics, the market independent childcare in the Middle Atlantic network.

Big Tech tries to make their data centers more energy efficient. They also install backup generators, generally fueled by diesel, to ensure uninterrupted power in the event of a power failure.

The operators of the data center, however, say that they did not plan to need this electricity offer to help network operators meet demand and look closely at how regulators of public services in Texas write regulations.

The Data Center coalition, which represents large technological companies and developers in the data center, wants standards to be flexible, because certain data centers may not be able to move on to the backup power as easily or as quickly as others.

The network operator should also balance this system with financial awards for data centers that have voluntarily closed emergencies, Dan Diorio said the Coalition of the Data Center.

PJM’s proposal that has just published revolves around a concept in which the data centers offered may not be guaranteed to receive electricity during an electrical emergency.

This has caused agitation among owners of power plants and the technological industry.

Many have questioned PJM’s legal authority to apply it or warn to destabilize energy markets and states scary investors and developers with uncertainty and risk.

“This is particularly worrying since states in the imprint of PJM are actively competing with other American regions for the data center and the investment of digital infrastructure,” said Digital Power Network, a group of bitcoin minors and developers of data centers, in the comments written in PJM.

The governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Illinois and Maryland have said that they feared that it was too unpredictable to provide a permanent solution and that it should at least be accompanied by incentives for data centers to build new energy sources and voluntarily reduce electricity consumption.

Others, including consumer defenders, have warned that he would not abuse electricity bills and that PJM should rather pursue a requirement “bring your own generation” to data centers to, in substance, build their own energy source.

In Indiana, Google has taken a voluntary route.

Last month, the public electricity service, Indiana & Michigan Power and the technology giant have filed a supply contract with Indiana regulators for a proposed data center of $ 2 billion planned in Fort Wayne in which Google has agreed to reduce electricity consumption when the network is underlined. The data center would, according to him, reduce electricity consumption by delaying non -urgent tasks on the date of stress of the electrical network.

However, important details are kept from the public and Ben Inskeep of the Citizens Action Coalition, a consumer defense group, said that that does not let the point the agreement is really precious, if not at all.

To a certain extent, the loading of large users of the grid during periods with high demand has a new approach to electricity.

This could save money for regular taxpayers, because energy is the most expensive during peak periods.

Abe Silverman, energy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, said that data centers can use and use all the electricity they want most of the time.

But to remove data centers from the grid during these hours during heat or the most extreme cold would not have to spend billions of dollars to build a bunch of power plants, he said.

“And the question is: is it worth it? Is it worth it for the company to build these 10 new power plants just to serve the data centers for five hours a year?” Said Silverman. “Or is there a better way to do it?”

___

Follow Marc Levy on x at: https://x.com/timelywriter