Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests

The nice thing with data centers is that they are somewhat flexible. It's not a constant load. Data center operators can choose to reduce load. And if properly engineered, they could do so automatically based on signals from the grid.

The issue with outdated grids is that it relies on technology (spinning mass) that's at this point a century old. Which makes it brittle against outages like you describe. The solution is not more spinning mass but batteries and renewables to take the place of that spinning mass. A battery can respond to oscillations in milliseconds. If you then add flexible load that can spin up/down based on the amount of available power, you gain a lot of stability.

https://iten.ieee-ies.org/journal-featured-article/2025/grid...

Though if you want to do a smoothing action on real power flux you'll have to colocate battery capacity with the converter. Which to be clear is fairly cheap to do as long as you get compensated for the substantial frequency stabilization capacity this represents. I'm talking like 15~120 minutes at converter nominal AC power of battery capacity.

The first 10~20% of reactive power are almost free from the converter electronics, btw....

In the end a renewable heavy grid can be extremely resilient due to all the batteries, but smart battery systems need to be incentivize or mandated because ‘dumb’ batteries are cheaper.

Proof by example: https://spectrum.ieee.org/grid-scale-battery-scotland

As the article says, this is difficult and adds significantly to the cost. But it is very possible.

(It also adds significantly to the cost of spinning mass generators too. Delivering 250% of nominal current in a short circuit situation requires beefing up a lot of components).

There are many others.

Is there such belief? My feel is that anybody to whom electrical grid stability has even crossed their minds know this.

During winter storm Uri, they did a duty cycle where we only had power available for ~6-12 hours at a time on the days it was available. This was apparently to avoid that very problem.

So far as I know, the obvious mitigations like winterizing NG generation and/or peering with neighbor grids have not been performed.

The problem in my mind is that, as it stands, the signal that everyone has to latch on to is itself affected by load and by different generators latching on with different time constants in a complicated feedback loop. Would having a single authoritative source be an improvement? Would that be a way to eliminate the need for inertia?

*I suppose the "target" phase would probably be based primarily on the output from the biggest inertial systems and take into account their ability to adjust phase and frequency.

Large projects will have a large load interconnection tariff that’s supposed to shoulder the costs of upgrading the infrastructure to support these new projects.

Data center discussions are weird right now because people assume these things don’t exist and propose them as solutions. They already exist.

The problem in the article is something different: The sites they’re talking about are designed to disconnect from the grid and use backup power when the voltage drops, which can be a problem because now there’s too much energy being supplied to the grid and not enough load to absorb it.

Reframing what you're saying, that would be a connection fee that worked out to just under 12 cents per kWh used for the first year, which seems both somewhat reasonable but also probably not going to move the needle much on the large deployments?

I don’t find anything outrageous whatsoever about building out transmission to strengthen regional interconnections. Lord knows we are decades behind the curve on this. If AI datacenters are what finally lets us maybe start to get a tiny bit ahead of the game I’m all for it. When the bubble pops there will finally be a bit of pressure off, and perhaps we can get back to a tiny bit of overbuilt capacity to cover for exceptional events again. And more reasonable projects maybe won’t be sitting in a decade long interconnection queue.

At some point we get to all collectively pay for our parents lack of investment in energy infrastructure. We have been living off our (great?) grandparents investments into the future and wide scale deindustrialization of the economy since I’ve been alive. At some point you run out of inertia.

Could always move to Texas if you hate the idea of your state ever possibly spending a dollar that benefits someone across the border. They islanded their grid pretty much precisely due to this attitude.

Watching the PJM and MISO interconnections over the past decade or so has been illuminating. It’s been a very slow moving disaster in the making that nearly no one is paying attention to.

As for your proposed solution I doubt anyone - including the datacenter operators - would argue since that is largely what tends to happen as it is. Just change utilization factor to capacity factor and sounds good to me!

Make the DCs themselves pay to play nice to work with the grid: BESS FFR/M-FFR, for generation capacity, and for transmission upgrades.

Right now, they're using privatized-deregulated communism to privatize the profits and socialize the costs. Everyone else shouldn't pay for these goddamn DCs.

Yes, but that's not what's happening. These giant loads are suddenly going offline and are making it the transmission and generation networks' problem. The DCs aren't going to pay for it when they can socialize the costs and problems onto others.

The most obvious answer is these big loads need FFR and M-FFR BESS (battery) capacity near them or on-site to decouple and absorb these huge transient load swings into something the grid can handle. ERCOT should set additional rules that large load customers must use load smoothing rather than simply dumping load at auto-reclosers/auto-cutouts. Not doing so forces the entire grid to be at risk of low inertia transient over-generation.

Because the Texian grid-operator (ERCOT) is predominantly isolated from the Eastern & Western US grids [†], serving mostly-just Texans – this is to avoid US Federal regulations, by being an only-intrastate entity (technically, which is: the worst kind of "correct" [∑]). This is a socially-engineered "problem".

This means their needs for maintaining grid inertia (which frequency is a measure-er of) are more difficult, as Texas cannot just purchase any substantial/meaningful electricity – everything must be generated in-house.

Worse, the lack of Federal regulations means ERCOT/Texas can create their own rules/regulations/markets for the management of electrical infrastructure. Texas chose to make (IMHO) the most-purely crony-capitalistic market [for buy/sell of MWhours] in worldwide existance – which leads to decannual winterstorm Disasters (totaling hundreds of BBillion$ in damages / hundreds dead). The losses from wasted silicon-ingot depositions (alone) are staggering $,,,.00 – just another cost of doing business within Texas's jurisdiction [ß].

After 2021's storm, some "free market" customers were left with a week of billing costing more than the year's remainder!.

Abbott will just blame the windmills and not a cost-incentive fee-structure which does not incentivize cold-weather preventative maintainance. In fact, it does the opposite (since electricity can 25X price-increase). "Tell me the incentive and I'll tell you the outcome."

[∑] having grown up and been schooled primarily in Texas, I think the best review I ever agreed with was: "The [L]one Star State" – Texceptionalism will kill us all

[†] small DC-DC grid-ties (altogether a low, single-digit percentage of ERCOT's overall capacity) exist with both grids, as well as another smaller with Mexico

[ß] which is why most hospitals/datacenters have their own diesel/LNG generators, on-site – in Texas these have even less regulations because: "temporary" see (e.g.): Tesla's multiple Texas facilities' backupsystems – enormous point-source pollutors

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If you want a good breakdown of the 2021 Texas storm's decimation of ERCOT/Texas/electricity, look for the great logs reddit /u/redditmudder did (in realtime) as this disaster was unfolding. I cannot remember exactly how low the frequency got... but I think we were closer to EU [50hz] than US [60hz] – as grid operators REAPED profits* from their failing infrastructure driving electricity orders-of-magnitude higher. This is all public information; it wasn't "windmills."

What matters is peak capacity. Using the grid as a free battery for when your intermittent sources of energy go away against your fairly constant loads only makes the grid weaker overall. The best part of these huge predictable load centers is utilization factor.

Storage of some sort would probably help some, but overall the best type of load for a grid is predictable constant usage. Bonus points if it can reasonably be part of a load shedding/demand response program.

Texan here. Actually, it depends on how hot our summer weather gets and, thus, how much A/C use is in play. When we get into a not-unusual run of multiple 100-degree (F.) days in a row, the available capacity often drops to the point where ERCOT begins issuing alerts about things like suggested times of day when running certain appliances might not be wise. Having lived through the nightmare of the February '21 winter storm outages, I keep the ERCOT dashboard[0] as a bookmark and check it at least once, every day of the year.

[0]: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards

The utility will force you to put equipment to correct for power factor (massive capacitor bank), resistive load, etc.

The utility also charges commercial users for apparent power (includes reactive power, or that sloshes around setting up a steady state), as opposed to just real power charged to residential users.

EDIT: in case your wondering, yes resistor loads is just glorified bunch of short circuits and a fan.

Of course, there are some downsides to this approach, but overall I think it’s a superior. Just look at renewable and battery penetration compared to other ISOs.

It's up to ERCOT to figure their own mess out. They will. Nobody else really has to care about it.