Texas is the perfect example of how not to run an electrical grid by not allowing other states to assist in an emergency.
In this case it's not really Texas 'not allowing' other states to help but the other states not allowing Texas. Conceivably federal law could be updated to remove those regulations and Texas would absolutely connect to the interstate grid at that point.
That, of course, ignores the fact that those regulations are in place for a reason. Texas refuses to play by the rules, and the impact of that is that they don't get help when it's important. It is unfortunate, but a direct consequence of the choices they made.
Super abusive. Let’s do away with safety systems that literally save human lives. Heck Texas doesn’t like them so let’s do away with them for the whole nation? How many people died during the last couple heat and cold induced grid outages in Texas? I lost count after a couple dozen. But those people were weak or poor anyway right? Texas strong!
No, it isn't. Any decent datacenter will have on-site generation in event of power grid failure, anyway. When I was an intern, the company I worked for would routinely go off grid during the summer at a call from the electric company. The electric company actually gave us significant incentives to do so, because us running on our own 12MW generator was effectively like the grid operator farming out a 12MW peaker unit.
The power company has a long list of who has backup power. I know of one factory where the generator was installed in the 1920s on a boiler from the 1880's - it is horribly inefficient, but the power company still gives the owners incentive to keep it working because for 4x the normal cost of power and 12 hours notice that generator can run the entire town it is in, which they do every 5 years when things really go wrong with the grid.
What is your definition of regularly, and what qualifies as getting it fixed? I know lots of places that had things scheduled, but on the day of, something "came up" that the test was pushed. I've seen others where they tested by only firing up the generator, but didn't actually use it to power the facility. I've also seen repair tags that sat "unlooked" at for years.
Not every facility is managed/financed the same for such a blanket statement as yours.
Agreed, the datacenters need to be extremely durable. What's more durable than proving you're able to withstand a power outage event? The grid does go down from time to time; they need to be ready to handle it. That's not a Texas-only kind of thing; power outages happen all over the US.
If the datacenter can't handle the outage that was announced as a probability ahead of time, they have no business running critical applications.
> We live in the digital age, so almost everything depends on data
> As in all mechanical devices, generators have a tendency to either break down(Let's not forget about associated switching gear.) or become subject to maintenance cut backs instituted my buffoons in management
> We cannot depend on human errors, we can depend on the electric grid, if properly handled and maintained
> Depending on generators just adds another link in the failure chain.
> Texas is the perfect example of how not to run an electrical grid by not allowing other states to assist in an emergency.
Their "free market" real time power auction makes no allowances for long term concerns like reliability. Any provider who spends money to address these sort of issues is immediately priced out of the market.
Some things are too important to leave to the "free market".
> without a problem
That doesn't really line up.
What is the alternative, have a state imposed monopoly with a single power company like PGE who I would not see as an ideal operator either. Same can be true for a lot of other similar generators across the company.
You’ll probably bring up the winter storm outage which is inexcusable but their neighbor to the north SPP had very similar failings in being prepared and only faired better because they have interconnects.
Texas has had some of the fastest adoption for wind and solar. It is far from perfect but I also think there is benefit to having multiple generation companies supplying to the grid. You have companies with different expertise and perhaps innovation.
The government can structure a public market in many different ways (they do this in many aspects of the economy). It’s not limited to real time auction vs single provider.
Except then they’d be subject to regulations. And we can’t have that now can we?
Why so salty? There are n>0 things the federal government does that I disagree with. On a subject I know nothing about why would I assume that Texas is wrong to avoid it's rules?
Of course, it is easy enough to deal with curtailment for many services. But, it should be on the table, either way.
It is really strange to see them categorized under
Data centers and other large, non-critical power consumers Region: us-south1 (Dallas)
Zones: us-south1-a, us-south1-b, us-south1-c
Availability: Dallas, Texas is also listed as a location for Vertex AI.
Region: "South Central US" (paired with "North Central US")
Azure Government: Region in Austin, Texas
Availability: Azure has a physical presence in Texas.
This sounds like someone was trying to mitigate the "AI is eating our small town electricity" and threw the baby along with the water.
And prioritizing humans (home heating, food freezing, etc ) over servers is a good thing.
If they’re that important, shouldn’t be a problem right? AI makes so much money right?
People come first. Not virtual hype driven land grabs.
Bender•2h ago
Shank•1h ago
I could see operators of datacenters in Texas wondering about this. Also, it's underrated how much critical infrastructure is dependent on datacenters running. Like, are you going to pull someone's EHR system down that serves a local hospital, while keeping the local hospital on a critical circuit?
Bender•1h ago
Knowing when the power will be cut will not help unless I am misunderstanding you. If the data-center loses power for even a minute the generators will all fire up and then every ATS will count-down and transfer in 30 seconds. Battery backup only lasts just long enough to do a quick return to service on a failed generator and even that is sketchy at best. A properly engineered data-center can run on reduced generator capacity.
Some data-centers are indeed on circuits deemed to be critical but I could see regulations changing this so that they are "business critical" vs. "life support critical" and some changes could be made at substations so that data-centers could participate in shedding. I think you are right that they will be thinking about this and adding to this probably filing preemptive lawsuits to protect their business. Such changes can violate SLA contracts businesses have with power companies and Texas is very pro-business so I can not compare it to California.
toast0•1h ago
If you know when the power will be cut, you can start the generators before the cut, and depending on your equipment, you may be able to synchronize the generator(s) with the grid and switch over without hitting the batteries. I assume big datacenters are on three phase, can you switch over each phase as it crosses zero, or do you need to do them all at once?
Bender•1h ago
I know what you mean though, the generators I worked with in the military had a manual frequency sync that required slowly turning a dial and watching light bulbs that got brighter with frequency offset. Very old equipment for Mystic Star, post-WWII era equipment. 50's to 90's
jimmygrapes•54m ago
dylan604•39m ago
bluGill•1h ago
Synchronizing generators is a thing, but it isn't useful for this situation since they need to be able to handle the sudden without warning power loss where generators cannot be synchronized anyway.
imglorp•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
doodlebugging•3m ago
I'm not sure that this is correct. I was initially worried about how Mom would fare since she lives alone and is over 80. During the entire one week period of power problems in Feb. 2021 my Mom never lost power, not even a quick brown-out. Her home is within a half mile of a local hospital which also never lost power. The area around the hospital did not lose power so businesses and homes close by had no issues with heating, cooking, bathing, etc during the cold blast. That fact allowed me to stay here at my place a couple hours away and manage my own situation which was fairly easy compared to many others in the state.
Your other statements are quite true and to date no one who played a part in mismanagement of utility power in Texas has been held accountable nor will they ever be in a libertarian state where regulations exist only to guarantee a profitable situation for a commercial entity. In fact, most electricity customers in Texas ended up paying for the huge cost increases that occurred as those in charge tweaked the system in real time to maximize their own profits.
Texas needs regulations worse than most other states. Grifters, fraudsters, and thieves have filled too many critical positions for too long.
vel0city•1h ago
bluGill•1h ago
nradov•59m ago
mschuster91•51m ago
Particularly the "last mile" often enough is only equipped with batteries to bridge over small brownouts or outages, but not with full fledged diesel engines.
And while hospitals, at least those that deal with operating patients, are on battery banks and huge ass diesel engines... private small practices usually are not, if you're lucky the main server has a half broken UPS where no one ever looked after that "BATTERY FAULT" red light for a year. But the desktop computers, VPN nodes, card readers or medical equipment? If it's not something that a power outage could ruin (such as a MRT), it's probably not even battery backed.
There's a German saying "the emperor is naked, he has no clothes". When it comes to the resilience of our healthcare infrastructure, the emperor isn't just naked, the emperor's skin is rotting away.
nradov•43m ago
tw04•13m ago
lowwave•1h ago
lokar•55m ago
Bender•51m ago
more_corn•50m ago
dylan604•37m ago
bilbo0s•8m ago
Until there's new management.
You can't run a business by seesaw.
Best to just count on that rule being enforced and place the necessary battery backups and wind or solar in place to backstop the diesel. Then make any users who need to use those data centers eat that extra cost. There's no problem with us-east costing less than us-west, and us-texas costing most of all. That's how markets work.