Data Centers’ Sudden Shutdowns: A New Threat to Our Power Supply

In a big area outside Washington D.C. known as Data Center Alley, over 200 storage facilities for data use as much electricity as the whole city of Boston. Last summer, a surprising event occurred: 60 of these data centers suddenly lost power from the main grid and switched to their own generators. This happened because of a safety measure meant to protect their machines from electrical problems. But when they all switched at once, it created a huge amount of extra electricity. This worried power company leaders because it could have caused serious problems with the electricity supply in the area.

PJM, the organization that manages the electricity grid, and Dominion Energy, the local utility, had to reduce the amount of electricity being produced to prevent a major blackout. Experts realized this type of event showed a new weakness in the U.S. electrical grid: if many data centers disconnect without warning, it can create big problems.

John Moura, a director at NERC (a group that keeps the grid reliable), explained that these massive data centers use so much energy that the grid is not prepared for them to drop offline quickly. Traditionally, power companies have only planned for big power plants to go offline, not large data centers.

The incident on July 10 near Fairfax, Virginia, caught attention because it almost led to big outages. This area handles around 70% of the world’s internet traffic, serving giants like Microsoft and Amazon.

Since then, regulators have been working on understanding why data centers disconnect so suddenly. There have been many similar near-misses recently as data centers continue to grow in number and size, using more and more energy. In fact, the electricity used by these facilities has tripled in the last decade and is expected to triple again by 2028.

In Texas, there have been over 30 similar near-misses since 2020 from big energy users like data centers cutting off their power.

Experts suggest that some data centers should be required to stay connected during minor electricity dips to avoid causing problems. However, operators worry that this could harm their machines, which are very sensitive to electrical changes. In Texas, a proposal to require data centers to stay connected during dips was canceled because of pushback from companies like Amazon and Google.

As new data centers come online, the risk of power outages will likely grow. Regulators and power companies need to work together to make sure that data centers are more responsible so that everyone’s power supply stays safe and reliable.