As companies look to build projects that consume more power than cities, the state’s grid manager is trying to plan how to provide enough electricity to meet the demand.
The “rapid explosion” of large load users looking to connect onto Texas’ electric grid are being built faster than traditional transmission planning can manage, according to the Electricity Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s grid operator.
Not that long ago, connecting factories and other large commercial facilities to the grid was a matter of predictable demand and growth. The grid had to maintain only a minimal transmission capacity buffer to absorb changes while balancing costs to ratepayers.
But the sheer volume of the energy demand from large data centers, particularly those serving artificial intelligence, requires an adjustment of the planning processes to keep the grid reliable, Kristi Hobbs, ERCOT’s vice president of system planning and weatherization, said last week at a Public Utility Commission of Texas meeting.
In September 2024, ERCOT was tracking 56 gigawatts in large load interconnection requests. Now, that number has almost quadrupled to 205 gigawatts. Energy experts are quick to point out that requested interconnection is no guarantee that construction will happen — and that 205 gigawatts is a huge number, more than twice as high as ERCOT’s peak demand record of 85.5 gigawatts in August 2023.
Still, ERCOT is tasked with planning transmission and ensuring that they can serve both existing and incoming customers at all times, Hobbs said.
Prior to the explosive growth of data centers to power AI, cloud computing and cryptomines, a jump in power demand from, for example, residential growth, meant the load would be distributed across the state. Texas, the largest state in the mainland United States, now sees a demand that is entirely different.
“When you look at companies that want to come and consume more power than cities in a single location — it’s hard to forecast and plan for that in the future,” Hobbs said of the state’s growing electricity demands.
As a result, ERCOT is looking to grant incoming large energy users a quicker interconnection if they are willing to commit to reducing their power use from the grid during certain grid or transmission conditions. Cooperating with shut-offs would help the grid operator incorporate more large data centers onto the grid while ERCOT works to bridge grid upgrades, and resource and load improvements, Hobbs said
If large load users pledge to curtail their grid power when capacity gets tight, it would give ERCOT more certainty and ability to provide a forecast of how the large loads are going to operate, Hobbs said. Are companies adding their own power, through their own onsite power plant? Or a private power agreement with a utility? Or backup generators?
The grid operator is now tracking 205 gigawatts of large load interconnection requests. More than 70% of the 205 gigawatts of current large load interconnection requests are from data centers and another roughly 10% are from cryptocurrency mines. It’s a massive jump from 56 gigawatts just over a year ago, according to the latest data from ERCOT.
Source: Arcelia Martin,
Photo Credit: Power lines stretch across the sky over a substation outside of Nacogdoches on Jan. 26, 2024. Leslie Nemec for The Texas Tribune
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