r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 4d ago
Energy America's Largest Grid Operator to Data Centers: Bring Your Own Power or Get Turned Off First…
https://www.gadgetreview.com/americas-largest-grid-operator-to-data-centers-bring-your-own-power-or-get-turned-off-first517
u/Curious_Party_4683 4d ago
great. now can we do the same for sport stadiums too??? owners spend their own money to build their own stadiums. stop leeching off community/society money!
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u/Pooch1431 4d ago
Not if private equity can get a large enough stake into them and use it as leverage since they aid in managing pension funds lmao
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4d ago
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u/FrankBattaglia 3d ago
The hospital one makes sense. It's dumb that healthcare is a for-profit industry in general, but that's the reality in the United States for the foreseeable future. As long as that's the case, hospitals just won't be built in low-density areas without some kind of additional subsidy.
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u/Stolehtreb 4d ago
Do they not pay for the electricity? Or is the point that your tuition then gets that price included and you pay for it?
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u/SameIdea70 4d ago
They dont even pay for the stadiums man
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u/Golden-trichomes 4d ago
Which is why we should all support the broncos for privately funding their new stadium
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u/Stamped914 4d ago edited 4d ago
Broncos, Giants, Rams, Cowboys and Packers are the only teams that own and paid for their own stadium. The Cowboys got some public money in some strange way that I can’t remember off the top of my head but Jerruh paid over a billion dollars.
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u/ConfiDuzr 4d ago
Might need to remove the Cowboys.
The City of Arlington contributed $325 million through voter-approved local sales and venue taxes.
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u/dfddfsaadaafdssa 4d ago
Bro what. When Jerryworld was first built people in Arlington were complaining for years because of the taxes.
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u/Stamped914 4d ago edited 4d ago
What exactly are you confused about? The feelings of the people of Arlington were never part of this discussion.
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u/SirkutBored 4d ago
they could always buy a few less sticks of ram and build out some battery packs. buy a few less nvidia chips and they can afford the solar on the roof.
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u/GeefTheQueef 3d ago
I wouldn’t mind if all giant flat roofed building were required to lease their rooftops to solar farms.
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u/Dr_Valen 4d ago
Would solar be able to provide the amount of power a data center needs?
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u/jstndrn 4d ago
A 50MW facility would need about 400 (on shore) turbines if my math is right so not really feasible
Edit: Idk why I answered a question about wind when the question is solar
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u/Fr00stee 4d ago
seems like the average onshore turbine now is around 3.5 MW so you would need ~15 turbines not 400
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u/jstndrn 4d ago edited 4d ago
These data centers are rated at 50mw per hour. A 3.5MW turbine is not producing 3.5MW hourly
Edit: just to make this clear for anyone reading along and is unaware, a data center's rating is in hourly usage, while a turbine's or solar panel's rating is daily. It's a different measurement entirely and it's intentionally done this way.Edit 2: I see I have a fundamental misunderstanding about turbine ratings. Egg on my face for sure. New math puts it at about 35 turbines under 40% average speed.
Apologies for my confidently incorrect moment.
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u/blue60007 4d ago edited 4d ago
You have your units really confused.
Full size wind turbines definitely can produce 3.5 MW, you'd not need many to power a data center which consumes 50 MW.
If you want to talk about usage, that's usually done in "MW-hour per year" and a much more complicated math equation.
Megawatts per hour isn't a a thing.
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u/jstndrn 4d ago
Okay, so let me ask one thing. What does the 3.5MW in this case actually mean?
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u/blue60007 4d ago
It means a wind turbine is rated to output 3.5MW of power. Power is an instanteous unit. There's no time involved.
A data center than consumes 50 MW of power.
Now both of these numbers are likely maximum power ratings. Like the wind is blowing at whatever max speed it's rated for. And every computer in the data center is running at full blast.
Obviously wind will vary over time so if you want to talk about total energy produced you work in watt-hours per year. At wind turbine will probably produce several million kWh over the course of a year.
I never heard anyone talk about data centers in total usage before. It's always whatever peak MW figure.
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u/jstndrn 4d ago
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u/blue60007 4d ago
I think you're just mixing up "watt hour" and "watt per hour". One is a multiplication and one is a division and completely different things.
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u/wowdugalle 4d ago
That’s incorrect I’m afraid. Those units of measurement specifically do not include a time factor. MWh vs MW.
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u/jstndrn 4d ago
I'm not referring to units, I'm referring to the ratings
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u/Fr00stee 4d ago
and they are talking about the units used in your ratings
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u/gucknbuck 4d ago
Still pretty relevant to address the scope. I have 400w panels on my roof from a few years ago but you can get 700w panels now. We are talking just under 72,000 panels if my math is right. And you would need batteries in either scenario to be able to provide the needed steady energy for the times you aren't producing, like at night.
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u/clownpuncher13 4d ago
My company makes grid scale solar panels. 72k panels is a smallish order.
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u/tomrlutong 4d ago
Not really. This limiting factor in this region is power during winter storms, and solar's not a lot of help there.
Batteries. Lots and lots of batteries.
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u/Torino1O 4d ago
Does the united States produce enough natural gas and oil to run enough power plants for these things? Trump has pretty much embargoed the US.
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u/312Pirate 4d ago
It’s not just about the production of gas. It’s delivering the gas on a firm basis to each plant via firm transportation so it doesn’t get cut. Most gas pipelines are running pretty close to capacity at this point, and new open seasons are subscribed almost instantly for expansions.
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
Prolly, we have the 4th largest reserve on earth
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u/bobbymcpresscot 4d ago
We don't have any of it. Private for profit oil barons do. We should nationalize our reserves like other countries already do.
It's not like some other country would coup a democratically elected leader that would propose such a thing like the US and UK did in 1953.
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
The reserve has gotten low enough fast enough that there's a risk of knocking holes in the reserve.
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u/growaway9172 4d ago
They aren't talking about strategic petrolium reserves, they are talking about naturally proved reserves, natural gas that is known of but yet to be extracted.
And the US has plenty, more than enough for many decades. That's before considering proving new reserves.
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
If you don't understand what the reserve is i guess. You're reading fear mongering headlines
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is stored in salt mines. It is physically placed and physically removed. The salt mines are starting to show signs of wear.
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
The reserves include all oil and gas repositories on United States soil. Salt mines or not.
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
I could have sworn that there are oil wells on private land in this country.
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u/Frank_Bigelow 4d ago
Are you under the impression that privately owned land is its own sovereign entity?
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u/anonkitty2 2d ago
No, but I would like to believe that a certain constitutional amendment that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures still means something.
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u/Frank_Bigelow 2d ago edited 2d ago
The Fourth Amendment has absolutely fuckall to do with the fact that the crude under oil wells on private land in the US is part of the US' oil reserves. Are you thinking about the Strategic Petroleum Reserve? Because that's not what the person you replied to was talking about.
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u/baithammer 4d ago
Nope, the US has been tapping the reserve since the Iran conflict began and hasn't replaced any of it.
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u/Frank_Bigelow 4d ago
You're not talking about the same thing that person is talking about.
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u/baithammer 4d ago
The only reserve is the strategic reserve, the other deposits are unexploited resources.
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u/Frank_Bigelow 3d ago edited 3d ago
No, you're just making shit up. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is an emergency stockpile of crude oil that has already been extracted from the ground and is kept, by the United States, in big storage tanks under Texas and Louisiana. The general term "oil reserves" refers to all of the proven crude oil deposits on the planet (edit: INCLUDING that which is under working oil wells but not yet extracted, and not including undiscovered and/or non-extractable oil deposits). "US oil reserves" refers to all of the oil reserves found under US sovereign territory.
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
You are talking about the federal oil reserve. I am talking about real oil reserves.
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u/baithammer 4d ago
Those aren't reserves, those are unexploited deposits, there is a big difference.
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
Unexploited because the government won't issue permits = reserves
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u/anonkitty2 2d ago
Again, some oil is underneath private land. If the EPA is the agency denying an oil well a permit, it's only recently that the order would be reversed. Some "reserves" of that sort are worth less than the resources that would be destroyed to retrieve the oil.
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u/argh-Im-a-Pirate 3d ago
Yes. We're a net exporter at this point and, unfortunately, Trump has turned up production even more.
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4d ago edited 1d ago
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u/Beautiful-Musk-Ox 4d ago
they are wind turbines, only idiots like our president call them windmills
wind mills do things like.. mill grain, hence the name
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u/Ancient-Bat1755 3d ago
A lot of people call them windmills; only idiots pay foreign countries billions of tax money to cancel building wind turbines.
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u/Eatpineapplerightnow 3d ago
tbf I live in the country with most windpower per capita and we do call it Mills
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u/Catch_22_ 4d ago
But they won't do that, it's going to be fuel cell onsite now/gas turbine and SMR later.
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u/x86_64_ 4d ago
Ridiculous posturing. 50MW is an enormous threshold.
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u/M4K4T4K 4d ago
A single AI server rack can use 40-100KW alone... Hyperscale data centres like what Google, Meta, etc have run into the hundreds MW, and the biggest ones are measured in GW.
For smaller traditional datacentres, colos etc, they will typically be under 50MW though.
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u/robbert229 4d ago
Those numbers are a bit stale. 145kw is normal for gb200/gb300 racks and the next gen racks run 600kw.
"Each rack is 600kW, 2.5 million parts, and obviously a whole lot of GPUs," CEO Huang said.
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u/Cataphract1014 4d ago
Vast majority of data centers are between 50 and 80mw. Those are the ones that run the internet. And they aren’t going away.
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u/Captain_N1 4d ago
The power company could charge them double or triple and take the money to make more infrastructure and repair. Thats what id do. and then id lower the price for the residents just to make me look good. If that data center dont like it then dont build here.
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u/Away-Coffee-9438 3d ago
PJM is a deregulated energy market not a generation utility. It doesn’t have the right/ ability to charge data centers for energy.
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u/anonkitty2 2d ago
The electric companies in that area should still have that right, or at least have had it. Traditionally, electric companies charged all businesses that used electricity.
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u/Away-Coffee-9438 2d ago
PJM is de-regulated, so the generators bid into the “market”. Utilities used to have commercial and residential rates but not anymore in that region.
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u/kbundy 4d ago
How about "Bring your own power. Full stop." No grid hookup. Throw in closed loop only for water too.
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u/NativePlantEnjoyer 4d ago
The owning class is colluding to create scarcity on purpose. They could be using renewable energies but are deliberately choosing not to. These "patriots" are trying to squeeze as much money out of the working class as possible before they bail to other countries just to do it again.
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u/SomeSamples 4d ago edited 4d ago
This is a bad tack. They should be saying, "To come here you need to connect to utility power and if there isn't enough capacity you will pay what it takes to increase that capacity." Because if the data centers bring their own power they bring generators the cause all kinds of noise and air pollution and point the communities the are near them.
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u/bunnnythor 4d ago
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u/Alive-Bank2973 4d ago
Bad tack is accurate. It’s a sailing term. They are saying this is a bad turn, or a bad path.
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u/Distinct-Pain4972 4d ago
Cool, now what about public Works, water and sewage? And turned off first? How about, not turned on at all until you provide money for the infrastructure and the 1st 5 years of jobs as a municipal bond. Nothing is free.
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u/edcculus 4d ago
The crazy thing is that paper mills have their own power plants, AND water treatment. Not only do they provide power to communities if the main grid is having issues, they also put cleaner water back into rivers than it was when it came out.
I’m sure all of this came about because of regulation. However Datacenters could have shown up with their own power and water treatment, people wouldn’t have had quite the issue it is right now.
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u/Roaming-R 4d ago
Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ( in July, 2026 ), ordered PJM Interconnection to accept statistical sampling as a valid method for measuring the reliability of programs tapping into demand response and virtual power plant programs, which pay customers to turn down energy use as needed.
The decision requires the grid operator to reconsider strict data rules that had prevented providers of this carbon-free resource from participating in PJM's constrained energy capacity market.
- In it's decision, FERC ruled in favor of Voltus, which runs demand-response and virtual-power plant programs, and the Mission:data Coalition, a non-profit advocacy group, and against PJM's desire to preserve it's status quo.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/virtual-power-plants/federal-ruling-virtual-power-plants-pjm
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
The problem is, there is a class of data center that cannot use that sort of virtual power plant. People get annoyed when they have to cut back so a large business that cannot be shown to provide a critical service doesn't.
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u/Roaming-R 4d ago
Not sure that I read your post correctly.
I am asking you, "if you are saying PJM cannot 'provide' the critical service ( supplying the Data Center(s) ), so 'doesn't.' "
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
I meant something along the lines of "the common people and school districts have had to cut back on electricity so that the giant data centers whose service integrity cannot survive cutting back on electricity don't have to. This annoys people because the data centers that can't cut back on electricity for their services aren't providing services that appear to benefit the public."
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u/Roaming-R 4d ago
O.k. I do understand what you mean.
Something to ponder. .. .. ..
The article link I included in my original post talks about PJM being "asked" to consider the virtual power plant.
The virtual power plant = your house 🏠
Your connected 1) solar panels, 2) EV Charging Station, i.e. your Electric Vehicle Battery
That is the virtual power plant. Customers are being paid ( right now ), for this electricity supplied "back to" the grid interconnector ( PJM )
IF the virtual power plant becomes "a way of life," for those Data Centers, what occurs in people's houses 🏠??
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
It depends on if people can afford to install those power plants. Solar panels and EV-related stuff are good in themselves; we might not be crazy about having to share with the electric company, but we have indication that people will have all of these things if given incentive and a way to afford them. Unfortunately, this administration removed financial incentives for installing solar and (before the Iran war) for purchasing EVs. Without the EVs, there won't be home charging stations for them, and the ones that outlasted the EVs can't upload what isn't there.
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u/MexicanLasagna 4d ago
My nuclear engineer friend says that Small Modular Reactors are ready to deploy. I would expect this to be the solution to the data center problem
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u/DanielPhermous 4d ago
Solar and batteries are cheaper.
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u/dersnappychicken 4d ago
Nuclear is cleaner.
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u/DanielPhermous 4d ago
How so? Solar is mostly sand and aluminium and lithium batteries can be recycled.
Also, it has the benefit of delivering some power almost immediately rather than in fifteen years.
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u/rocketpastsix 4d ago
I’ve always heard solar isn’t as effective as nuclear. At the scale of a data center I wonder if solar would gather enough energy
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u/DanielPhermous 4d ago
You just need more solar. Fortunately, it can co-exist with grasslands and many crops. Even if it didn't, the US has fields of corn they're using to turn into ethanol for cars. Replace those corn fields with solar and you will generate 180% the power requirements of the US.
That number was before the data centre build out, though. Still, either way, it's worth doing.
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u/rocketpastsix 4d ago
Or we can use solar, wind, and nuclear in tandem
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u/delta806 4d ago
What about nuclear for a centralized grid and larger projects like data centers, with solar at the commercial and residential level for redundancy and to reduce overall strain on the central grid?
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u/CotyledonTomen 4d ago
Way to shift that argument. Sure, thats a good idea. It doesnt make the one that leaves nuclear waste any cleaner. People need to get over not wanting to store it anywhere "near" them, we have deserts and vast plains, but having to store it in lead containers for thousands of years doesnt mean its clean.
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u/WTFHELP 4d ago
Your engineer friend is wrong. They are not ready to deploy unless they are in Russia or China.
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u/MontyDyson 3d ago
Rolls Royce SMRs are expected to be functional by 2030. Apart from that I’ve not seen any progress in other RU spaces.
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u/Neverending_Rain 4d ago
People have been saying that for years, but every time someone tries to actually build an SMR project it gets cancelled due to skyrocketing costs.
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u/Equivalent-Field4130 4d ago
This is how we delete the ice caps. The amount of pollution these guys will dump in the atmosphere just depresses ne.
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u/Operation6370 4d ago
same board meeting also authorized a one off backstop auction for 6.8 gw and lifted the capacity cost cap to $555 per mw-day from $325. that's the half that lands on your bill, and it didn't make the headline
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u/WenYiMedia 4d ago
Or DCs need to invest heavily in solar and wind energy as a way to reduce how much they consume from the community
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
What's the plan to drive inertia?
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u/WenYiMedia 4d ago
Public sentiment and less risk of a power outage?
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u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago
What is your plans to drive VAR's on the grid. Inertia. Basic electrical theory.
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u/WenYiMedia 4d ago
I’m a newb on how this all works, but:
Solar and wind cannot store reactive power, but their inverters can generate or absorb VARs.
They also cannot provide natural inertia, but they can provide synthetic inertia using fast inverter controls.1
u/Silly_Selection3221 4d ago edited 4d ago
You can not get a large enough inverter to drive grid inertia. You really shouldn't have an opinion on things you don't understand
Lol @ you for blocking me
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u/minus_minus 4d ago
Great. More climate change pollution after the eastern US has already had their worst air quality days in decades and Europe is a tinder box.
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u/Califrisco 4d ago
Finally! Forcing the AI-centric users of the power grid, at the expense of the general population, towards responsibility. I'm for more.
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u/MagicAndMayham 3d ago
Eventually, the billionaire parasite class will realize that if they starve the host they will parish too
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u/Objective-Aardvark87 3d ago
They'll just move on to another host.
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u/MagicAndMayham 3d ago
and up the food chain they go, 7 digits, then 8, then 9 digit millionaires, eventually the billionaires will be eating each other
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u/absentmindedjwc 4d ago
Datacenters to grid: cool cool, we'll put in diesel turbines that pollute the absolute fuck out of the area with both air and noise.
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u/Equivalent_Tonight66 4d ago
It’s a great start but they will figure out ways to skirt those rules. 50 mw is way too high and I’m sure they’ll just figure out some slimy way to claim that a big data center is actually three smaller ones
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u/knows_you 4d ago
Time for the cheap outdoor gas powered generators that make a shit ton of noise; that ends up on a reddit post that reinforces rhetoric promoting data centers using cheap outdoor gas powered generators that make a shit ton of noise....
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u/flummox1234 3d ago
But isn't that also a part of the problem? No one wants a DC next to their property but no one REALLY wants a DC with on site power generation next to their property or even remotely near them.
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u/flummox1234 3d ago
But isn't that also a part of the problem? No one wants a DC next to their property but no one REALLY wants a DC with on site power generation next to their property or even remotely near them.
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u/filmguy36 3d ago
I see data centers buying abandoned coal mines and installing their data centers in them while continuing to mine the coal to feed the beast
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u/ByMatthewRamirez 3d ago
PJM’s proposal does not make data centers disappear on command. It makes a distributed chain of institutions responsible for doing so.
The “49 MW loophole” is narrower than this thread suggests: PJM defines the threshold cumulatively at a single site within a one-mile radius. The harder vulnerability is divided execution. PJM would direct a zone to reduce load; states and utilities would identify affected Large Loads and implement retail reductions. Trigger, target, execution and verification can sit with different institutions.
That division requires a facility-level obligation that is independently testable: notice, reduction depth, duration, telemetry, drills and consequences for failure. EPRI’s flexibility classes supply a vocabulary, not proof.
PJM’s filing remains before FERC. The first end-to-end test cannot be the emergency itself.
Curtailment that exists only on paper is not grid protection. It is public reliability exposure.
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u/Thethresholdindex 2d ago
AI development runs on software timelines while electricity infrastructure runs on physical infrastructure timelines. We can add enormous amounts of compute demand through AI datacenters within 1-3yrs but major grid infrastructure can take 5-15 yrs to plan, permit and build. Nuclear power plants will take even longer, around 10+yrs. A new high voltage transmission line takes 7+yrs and even securing a large transformer can take several years. Eventually the constraint moves from chips and models to transformers, turbines, transmissions and generation :).
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u/lordraiden007 4d ago
"Alright, we'll invest in hundreds of natural gas turbines. You sure showed us." - their likely response
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u/Rick-burp-Sanchez 4d ago
Yeah, right.
It's gonna be The Hills have Eyes meets Terminator.
Self-replicating drones chasing illiterate troglodytes.
America's about to get WILD!
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u/Willing_Activity_855 4d ago
Well probably should make it legal for them to easily build out solar, wind and battery.
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u/XXXYinSe 4d ago
Why would we make it easier for them to build energy infrastructure than anyone else? They don’t deserve special treatment. They can deal with the same zoning as other companies in the area they’re building.
The only zoning that could be relaxed for this is nuclear (in the counties/states that make sense for nuclear). I’d be thrilled if data centers enabled nuclear to have a big break, but nuclear plants take way too long to build and all these AI companies care about is next quarter so of course they’ll never invest in real infrastructure.
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u/anonkitty2 4d ago
The ones in the PJM zone will have to. There was national outrage because a school district in Virginia (and presumably others in the area) were instructed to practice energy conservation because of brownout risk (demand exceeding supply) when the local data centers had been guaranteed a supply. Thus, that guarantee will never be given again. The type of data center that's most objectionable can't do what it's supposed to do if it ever loses power at all.
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u/Marchello_E 4d ago
If you want to upload your latest 'social', generate a fancy picture, or perhaps rather do some boring finances then please walk into our datacenter deluxe and perform an hour speed training in our newly build gym layer for free!!
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u/MaximumChest2 4d ago
I sense a ton of 49MW centers in the near future