Big Tech’s data center boom poses new risk to US grid operators
Hindustan TimesBy Tim McLaughlin Big Tech’s data center boom poses new risk to US grid operators BOSTON - Data Center Alley, a 30-square-mile stretch outside Washington D.C. and home to more than 200 data centers, consumes roughly the same electricity as Boston. The near-miss - reported here in detail for the first time - forced federal regulators to recognize a new vulnerability of America’s electrical grid: unannounced disconnections by data centers. A month after the incident, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the federal regulator for grid reliability, founded a taskforce to study en masse disconnections by data centers and crypto miners. A Reuters review of disclosure filings by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s main grid operator, identified more than 30 near-miss incidents since 2020, triggered by big energy users like data centers and crypto miners switching offline.
History of this topic
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