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The issue with outdated grids is that it relies on technology (spinning mass) that's at this point a century old.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 available power, you gain a lot of stability.

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.

That’s a simplified and somewhat outdated version, there’s a huge range of technology to mitigate each of these issues but infrastructure generally isn’t free. A turbine does provides inertia for free where you need to pay for a flywheel or battery system.

In the end a renewable heavy grid can be extremely resilient due to all the batteries, but smart battery systems need to be incentivize or mandated because ‘dumb’ batteries are cheaper.

10+ MW voltage-source converters that can't do up to around 80% of their nominal capacity as mostly-reactive apparent power with stabilizing synthetic inertia scaled as desired/specified are a mostly software issue, stemming from lack of regulatory pressure incentivizing the engineering complexity of that.

Though if you want to do a smoothing action on real power flux you'll have to colocate battery capacity with the converter. Which to be clear is fairly cheap to do as long as you get compensated for the substantial frequency stabilization capacity this represents. I'm talking like 15~120 minutes at converter nominal AC power of battery capacity.

The first 10~20% of reactive power are almost free from the converter electronics, btw....

To add on to this overview, there are a new class of inverters in research called grid forming inverters which don't just follow the rest of the grid. One interesting technique is they can simulate the inertia of a traditional rotating machine/generator.

https://iten.ieee-ies.org/journal-featured-article/2025/grid...

> Contrary to belief, renewables, or generally speaking DC, makes things this stability problem worse.

Is there such belief? My feel is that anybody to whom electrical grid stability has even crossed their minds know this.

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?

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

Some of us in Texas are all too familiar with the problem of balancing load with generation, the risk of a cascade failure causing a slow restart.

During winter storm Uri, they did a duty cycle where we only had power available for ~6-12 hours at a time on the days it was available. This was apparently to avoid that very problem.

So far as I know, the obvious mitigations like winterizing NG generation and/or peering with neighbor grids have not been performed.

Grid scale battery systems are also used to maintain proper synchronization.

All projects have an interconnection fee.

Large projects will have a large load interconnection tariff that’s supposed to shoulder the costs of upgrading the infrastructure to support these new projects.

Data center discussions are weird right now because people assume these things don’t exist and propose them as solutions. They already exist.

The problem in the article is something different: The sites they’re talking about are designed to disconnect from the grid and use backup power when the voltage drops, which can be a problem because now there’s too much energy being supplied to the grid and not enough load to absorb it.

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.

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

> It's outrageous that I'm paying an extra fee to export energy to a neighboring state to power a datacenter.

I don’t find anything outrageous whatsoever about building out transmission to strengthen regional interconnections. Lord knows we are decades behind the curve on this. If AI datacenters are what finally lets us maybe start to get a tiny bit ahead of the game I’m all for it. When the bubble pops there will finally be a bit of pressure off, and perhaps we can get back to a tiny bit of overbuilt capacity to cover for exceptional events again. And more reasonable projects maybe won’t be sitting in a decade long interconnection queue.

At some point we get to all collectively pay for our parents lack of investment in energy infrastructure. We have been living off our (great?) grandparents investments into the future and wide scale deindustrialization of the economy since I’ve been alive. At some point you run out of inertia.

Could always move to Texas if you hate the idea of your state ever possibly spending a dollar that benefits someone across the border. They islanded their grid pretty much precisely due to this attitude.

Watching the PJM and MISO interconnections over the past decade or so has been illuminating. It’s been a very slow moving disaster in the making that nearly no one is paying attention to.

As for your proposed solution I doubt anyone - including the datacenter operators - would argue since that is largely what tends to happen as it is. Just change utilization factor to capacity factor and sounds good to me!

Your math on the house seems off by a factor of 4? But 30% utilization seems high, as that would be a $2k/mo electric bill at 20 cents/kWh.

Reframing what you're saying, that would be a connection fee that worked out to just under 12 cents per kWh used for the first year, which seems both somewhat reasonable but also probably not going to move the needle much on the large deployments?

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 usage. Bonus points if it can reasonably be part of a load shedding/demand response program.

Data centers are pretty useful for adding more renewables to the grid. They generally have both a UPS (for short-term outages) and backup generators (for long-term outages). UPS means they're already paying for inverters and some amount of batteries, and then in combination with a more renewable grid, it makes sense to put the grid storage batteries there, and they have the incentive to do it to take advantage of time of day metering by actually running on them during peak demand hours. Likewise, if you have a huge capacity backup generator and the grid is stressed because renewable generation is low (and therefore prices get high), you can turn it on. Which allows the grid to get more power from renewables the other 95% of the time.

Texas is the standing proof that "making sure that all of this massive extra cost doesn't just get dumped on consumers" is not a problem. Texas has the most load, the most marginal load added every year, and the cheapest retail power. Load grew 15% in the 5 years to 2024, and retail prices fell by 1¢.

If you're large enough your connection to the grid is a negotiation with an engineering team.

The utility will force you to put equipment to correct for power factor (massive capacitor bank), resistive load, etc.

The utility also charges commercial users for apparent power (includes reactive power, or that sloshes around setting up a steady state), as opposed to just real power charged to residential users.

EDIT: in case your wondering, yes resistor loads is just glorified bunch of short circuits and a fan.

No. I imagine they are less sensitive and generally stay online and are only de-energized if the utility has an outage

Texas was the leading state in new grid battery installs for the last few years.

A lot would probably be an understatement. Aren't most batteries in data centers designed to just hold load for seconds or a few minutes at a time while generators start up?

I'd rather see legislation banning crypto mining and AI data centers from the public grid entirely. No sense in forcing the broader public to subsidize them.

More scarce resources used to feed the surveillance state's fancy chat bots