The data center industry is booming, as cloud providers seek to scale up their services to keep pace with demand driven by AI. In Texas, the boom is particularly bountiful. Outside of Virginia, there is no other place in the U.S. with a higher concentration of server farms than the Lone Star state (it has over 400 data centers, currently). Now, a new report claims that all these data centers may be driving up the risk of winter blackouts which, under the right circumstances, could prove life-threatening.
NBC News originally reported on a new report put out this week by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a non-profit based in Georgia that monitors risks to the U.S. electrical grid. In its annual report, NERC discussed how the growth of the data center industry is putting additional pressure on the grid.
NERC’s report notes that strong “load growth from new data centers and other large industrial end users is driving higher winter electricity demand forecasts and contributing to continued risk of supply shortfalls.” Electricity demand is obviously higher during colder times of year, as the estimated 42 percent of Americans who rely on electricity for heating crank up the dial when the temperature outside drops. However, the increased reliance on electricity ironically drives up the potential for grids to exceed load capacity and experience outages. Data centers put more pressure on a system that is already under strain, the report notes, writing:
For the upcoming winter season, Texas RE-ERCOT is expected to continue facing reserve shortage risks during the peak load hour and high-net-load hours, particularly under extreme load conditions that accompany freezing temperatures. Elevated forced outage of thermal resources and reduced output from intermittent resources during these conditions exacerbates the risk of supply shortfalls.
In addition to the hundreds of data centers that already exist in Texas, the state also has projects in development—although skeptics say it won’t be feasible for all of those projects to actually get built. NBC writes that there has been a huge increase in projects requesting connection to the Texas grid over the past year:
If all of those projects were actually built, they would be equivalent to the average annual power consumption of nearly 154 million homes in Texas, according to a CNBC analysis based on 2024 household electricity data. But the Lone Star state only has a population of about 30 million people. Beth Garza, a former head of ERCOT’s watchdog, said she is very skeptical these projects will all get built, describing the scale of the numbers as “crazy big.” More than half the projects have not submitted planning studies, according to ERCOT.
As the AI revolution continues, unforeseen side-effects will continue to pop up. I suppose disruptions to the electrical grid are just one more price we may all have to pay so that humanity can have chatbots that can rap.
