I have read in other contexts that Texas has the least stable power grid in America. It has more downtime than even California, with it's annual wildfires. Despite the regulatory appeal, it does argue against data center expansion in Texas generally.
Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
101–110 of 131 posts
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#102For 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…
Practical Engineering made an outstanding video on this: "What Really Happened During the Texas Power Grid Outage?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08mwXICY4JM
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#103This 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.
> 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.
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.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
The ELI5 version is you're arm-wrestling someone and they suddenly let their arm go limp, so your arm slams down on the table since you can't react that fast.
To build on this analogy, tug of war fits a bit better. Nothing dramatic happens if one person let go, but if half of one team just let loose at the same time without communication, bad things happen.
Keeping the build trend going:
Communication that detects the release and travels as close as possible to the speed of the natural signal in the rope, and is robust enough to recover without losing stability if the other team grabs the rope again while your "let go" signal is mid-flight.
One way to dampen this is to put a really strong guy on each side, with instructions to never let go of the rope. These are the flywheels of the grid.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#105The problem: multi-GW DCs going suddenly offline leading to rapid transient overproduction.
What's missing is sufficient FFR and M-FFR BESS (battery) capacity to smooth out these sudden disconnects. There's only about 20 GW of BESS generation capacity total in the system now, and ERCOT needs at least 3x more. Placing large FFR and M-FFR near these giga DCs is what it will take to absorb transient overproduction transients from hurting generators or tripping the grid. This is something DCs should pay for rather than upending how the grid works for problems they cause.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#106How 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.
No, because that doesn't go far enough and still shifts some costs onto everyone else.
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.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Linear progression is unfair, just like for taxation. If you're going to make a law like this, it should be something like nlog(n) so that the big players that abuse the system pay more than the little guy.
Now you made me wish for nlog(n) income tax as well.
n*ln(n) - a, such that below a, people receive a negative tax/progressive UBI.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would demanding that large spikey users of energy like data centers implement some sort of demand ramping/isolation from the grid in the form of a massive capacitor bank or flywheel generator between them and the grid help reduce the risk here?
The data centres aren't inherently spikey, in general use their consumption is reasonably predictable. However, if a DC detects that the _grid_ is wobbly (voltage or frequency deviations) the DC will disconnect without warning, and switch to its batteries and generators. The grid complains because it's suddenly lost hundreds of MW of load. For the DC to have isolation capability, it would need a load-sink which can c…
This is where a smart grid would really shine, because the utility could drop the electricity price to 0 or even negative and turn on 100,000 air conditioners/heaters to effectively give people free climate control to absorb the load imbalance.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#109I'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 seco…
> could be designed with load banks on site to stand in for the IT load
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.
Re: Texas grid flags risks as data centers, crypto sites fail voltage tests
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 availab…
> Newton's First Law didn't change much in the time that has passed. No, but technology has moved on quite a bit. Heavy fly wheels are no longer the state of the art here. A few tens of GW of battery capacity (i.e. a few dozen nuclear plants worth of capacity) that can switch on/off in milliseconds can do a lot for grid stability. That's part of the reason why grid operators are rolling out so much batteries. It's no…
Respectfully, I believe you have confused "new" with "state of the art". China is likely using batteries because their battery production is subsidized, Australia's trading partner is China so basically equivalent.
Perhaps a bad analogy, but it seems these battery systems attempt to stabilize by "pushing", whereas spinning mass can also work through "dragging" the phase. So eventually, you will have just a few rotating masses setting the freq and phase, with more and more systems tracking that and pushing, which seems like a recipe for chaotic equilibrium.