By TIM MCLAUGHLIN Reuters
Share this story

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. So power company officials were alarmed when a big chunk of those centers – 60 of them – suddenly dropped off the grid one day last summer and switched to on-site generators.

The mass reaction was triggered by a standard safety mechanism across the data center industry, intended to protect computer chips and electronic equipment from damage caused by voltage fluctuations. But it caused a huge surge in excess electricity, according to federal regulators and utility executives.

ADVERTISING

The magnitude of the imbalance forced grid operator PJM and local utility Dominion Energy to scale back output from power plants to protect grid infrastructure and avoid a worst-case scenario of cascading power outages across the region.

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.

“As these data centers get bigger and consume more energy, the grid is not designed to withstand the loss of 1,500-megawatt data centers,” John Moura, Director of Reliability Assessment and System Analysis for NERC, told Reuters in an interview. “At some level it becomes too large to withstand unless more grid resources are added.” Historically, grid operators have planned for large power plants tripping offline. But the rapid expansion of data centers processing the vast amounts of information used for AI and crypto mining is forcing grid operators to plan for new contingencies and complicating the already difficult task of balancing the country’s supply and demand of electricity.

“What it tells us is that the behavior of data centers has the potential to cause cascading power outages for an entire region,” said Alison Silverstein, a former senior adviser to the chairman of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

The event last July 10 occurred near the D.C. suburb of Fairfax, Virginia, an area known as Data Center Alley for its concentration of facilities serving Microsoft, Google and Amazon. About 70% of the world’s internet traffic flows through the area. A month after the incident, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), the federal regulator for grid reliability, founded a taskforce to study en masse disconnections by data centers and crypto miners.