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

For those who dont know why this is important:

The loads are slowing down the generators that are burning a well metered amount of fuel to stay at 60Hz. This is a delicate balance since the phase angle must also be spot on.

If a generator and the local line disagree on f, phase or V, you have a short circuit.

If you lose a large amount of load, your generator will spin up with the excess fuel until the control system re-establishes the right amount of fuel.

But now your generators are out of sync! No worry, for small disturbances the dissipative losses sync everything up like syncros on a manual transmission.

But the disturance cant be too big!

Rotating machines are big and heavy, so the first line of defense is their inertia. But this is a finite (and precious) resource.

Contrary to belief, renewables, or generally speaking DC, makes things this stability problem worse. They generate large amounts of power while providing no inertia.

You'd think it isn't a big deal since the DC-AC converter can just synthesize whatever is needed. Heck just keep it rigid at 60 Hz with no phase change.

Well the later doesn't work - the rest of the grid is no longer at that phase and frequency so you got yourself a short.

Furthermore, the DC-AC converter, despite their manufacturers' promise, has no good way to establish what f and phase it should be at during a disturbance (and these magic codes are closed source, believe it or not)

Anywho, a large enough loss of load causes the grid to enters into unstable oscillations, causing protective relays to trip causing a zipper effect where the grid goes down.

Now restart will take a few days depending on the energy mix (fastest for hydro heavy)

Long story short - this is not a trivial problem, and the data-centers can't be allowed to just dump load willy nilly.

EDIT: made it clear that the grid killing disturbance is not caused by renewables; not exclusively anyway. Everyone has to play nice or the grid goes down.

I'm a bit confused about why this is a serious engineering problem.

If a gigawatt class DC suddenly needs to take its sensitive IT loads off grid, it could be designed with load banks on site to stand in for the IT load. These would be exceptional use only, so the specific cooling technology (obviously we want to boil water) is not much of an ecological concern. A gigawatt will vaporize ~100 gallons of water per second. How long until the grid can adapt? Five minutes? That's not exactly a heroic amount of water for these projects.

How about an across the board $1/W hook up fee for new customers? Thats about the price of installed capacity per watt.

New house with 200 A panel an assumed 30% utilization rate? $3600.

New data center with 80% utilization rates at 100MW? $80 million dollars.

New 10 GW data center? That'll be $8 billion.

It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.

Charge them the cost of installing mitigations that can pick up the load if they drop it suddenly.

This all seems "routine".

Also the little sound bite about peak demand, Texas has enormous capacity during the summer as well; far, far exceeding demand. It makes total sense to be testing and connecting multi-GW consumers during these months.

This almost seems like a straw man to me. Isn't the much larger problem the actual increased energy usage and making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers?

I am a huge proponent of AI actually, but very suspicious that "financiers" are suddenly creating what amounts to an energy tax by finding legal ways to sneak extra fees or rates into our electricity bills to cover build out and commercial usage costs.

But as far as smoothing out demand, my (admittedly a layperson) theory is that we need to force them to adapt more solar and wind and at the same time more facilities for handling the variable production from that. Such as more large batteries and a shift to large scale long term storage of renewable fuel like hydrogen or other fuels produced directly from renewable sources.

If you have a large production and storage of renewable fuel, then maybe you can build that in such a way that it can handle significant input variations that could include excess grid power.

I’m curious how this works for other large consumers. Do they have some kind of artificial load that lets them gradually reduce consumption instead of doing it all at once?

Do we really need to keep slamming the grid and killing the planet for pseudonymous casino chips?

Can someone please merge crypto with llm training/inference somehow?

This sounds like a good reason to have a lot of batteries.

I look forward to hearing from the usual suspects how the inevitable failure is the fault of wind and solar power.

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I think it's time to put data centers on a power budget. If they want to make more money, they need to become more efficient and eliminate AI fraud, waste, and abuse.