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

reuters.com

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

#71

Post by analog31 »

hippich wrote: post #63
threwrfaway wrote: post #26

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…

When you say "short circuit" - is this when wires get hit and make and burn, or this is reference to some other stuff?

Short circuit is when two sources try to drive the same node in a circuit at different voltages or frequencies. In an idealized circuit (such as where the wires are assumed to have zero resistance), current flow from one source to the other is infinite. In a real circuit, current flow rises to a level where "something has to give." This could include heating the wires between the sources or tripping some kind of protection mechanism.

I'm not great with analogies, but imagine a train with two locomotives, and each one is set to run at a different speed. There will probably be a lot of screeching of wheels etc. To make multiple locomotives work on a single train requires engineering them to be synchronized with one another.

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

#72

Post by selfhoster1312 »

threwrfaway wrote: post #15

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.

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.

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

#73

Post by soulofmischief »

askvictor wrote: post #70
HWR_14 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas has an independent energy grid, so are not exporting energy to them.

Yes, although, with enough datacentres, it starts to get linked to other grids via data i.e. it starts 'exporting' its energy via compute

Interesting when you start to take this insight seriously. You could imagine data centers becoming important military targets in the future if the US ever balkanizes. Beyond that, securing compute could become a part of everyday trade agreements.

As things industrialize further, a state's net compute flow might become a topic of campaign promises. We may later find correlations between states' access to quality compute and the educational/financial outcome of younger generations.

To be sure, my leverage and inertia with a $200/mo ChatGPT Pro subscription is already a lot higher than it is without. We're not talking about just chatbots anymore, modern agentic models represent a quantifiable increase in individual agency. Whether or not the job market implodes, I am able to make progress on things even while asleep or busy with something else. This kind of agentic capital has never been available to the working class before at scale.

States like Texas, with their independent grid, might find themselves in a favorable position in such a balkanization event, but past events have proved that ERCOT is not ready to operate a statewide power grid. I was in Texas during the '21 cold snap and it was brutal. I was using my gas stove for heat. If resources for compute suddenly became constrained, and compute was deemed a matter of security and economic survival, it would be a cutthroat environment for operators of Texas' existing 400+ data centers.

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

#74

Post by sph »

selfhoster1312 wrote: post #72
threwrfaway wrote: post #15

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.

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.

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

#75

Post by bob1029 »

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.

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

#76

Post by jillesvangurp »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #69
jillesvangurp wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grid forming batteries and inverters are a thing. They can control the frequency on the grid. Just a matter of getting the right equipment. 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 reli…

> 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 not necessarily about supplying energy for a very long time but about smoothing out peaks and dips in energy supply and demand and responding more or less in real time to that.

This stuff is basically being rolled out at industrial scale in a lot of places. Australia, China, etc. pretty much run increasingly on mostly renewables. This is no longer as speculative as it would have been ten years ago.

Yes, there are engineering challenges with rolling that stuff out in a lot of places. And even more policy and regulation challenges. Actually that is, by far, the #1 challenge in places like the US and Europe. Grid operators are simply structured and incentivized wrong to deal with this stuff efficiently. Texas is actually not doing too bad relative to e.g. California. But they clearly have some challenges still.

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

#77

Post by negative_zero »

It always seems wild to me how, in the US, something like the grid is just a wild west.

"ERCOT said it is reviewing the test failures and drawing up plans to protect the grid from disruptions."

Why are they even allowed to connect? / Why are they not kicked off? / Why aren't they being forced to add their own grid inertia?

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

#78

Post by somewhereoutth »

threwrfaway wrote: post #26

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…

So apparently grid forming or synthetic inertia can be provided electronically nowadays, but presumably it would not be too terrible to put a rotating mass in between the (e.g.) solar power source and the rest of the grid? So the electricity from the solar panels runs a motor that turns a generator. I suppose power is lost through friction and other inefficiencies, and you'd need to co-locate the solar panels into a big enough farm.

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

#79

Post by DoctorOetker »

phil21 wrote: post #39
ilaksh wrote: post #21

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…

Solar and wind would make it worse. 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 usag…

Some kind of large aerostat / inflatabe chimney reaching up till the tropopause largely insulating for most of its length, but with heat engines on top and on bottom. I'm not proposing to use water / ice transition, but just consider a hypothetical strong suspension system, heaving a bucket of water weighing 1 mass unit can be powered by lowering a bucket of ice weighing 1 mass unit (ignore tiny density difference). So one can simultaneously bring 2 thermal baths close together, both at the bottom of the heat loop (where ambient temperature and tropopause temperature in the loop are close by each other) as well as at the top (where ambient cold tropopause temperature and surface temperature in the loop are close by each other). So both at the top and the bottom mechanical power can be generated with a heat engine.

The ground level vs tropopause temperature difference is not perfectly stable but largely maintained throughout day and night cycles, it is effectively base load, no nuclear required! We could generate energy while helping the planet cool.

Best to place these in seas, at least 1 structure length away from coastline, not in the middle of densely populated area. Salty sea water can be frozen (purifying it because ions get pushed into the brine) for desalination, brought to conventional thermal power plants, melted on their cold sides producing potable water while improving the thermodynamic efficiency of the thermal power plant (more electric energy per unit of fuel / rod spent).

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

#80

Post by chaz6 »

threwrfaway wrote: post #26

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…

Is it feasible to tie the grid frequency to an external clock reference, such as TAI?
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