Just before 8 a.m. Wednesday, electricity flickered on and off for about 10 minutes. An engineer’s data says it happened throughout the Eastern half of the U.S., from Chicago, to Boston and Miami.
He ties the problem to Data Center Alley in Ashburn, Virginia, and says the seemingly small blip is a sign our infrastructure is in danger.
Experts say cracks in our infrastructure grid are starting to show as the data center industry consumes electricity at a rate the world has never experienced. On Wednesday, a crack became visible to millions of Americans in their homes and businesses.
“This is what experts are worried about, right? The data centers are such a big load on the grid that they can have detrimental impact on the surrounding grid,” said Bob Marshall with Ting Labs.
The company sells a device to plug into your wall to monitor your home’s electricity and alert you if something’s awry, to try to prevent an electrical fire.
“You plug it in, connect it to Wi-Fi. It takes 30 million electric measurements every second,” Marshall explained.
Power drops and spikes in the data: ‘This is what experts are worried about’
With millions of these devices in homes across the U.S., Marshall’s data collection saw something he flagged as a concern: At 7:56 a.m. Wednesday, electricity throughout the Eastern half of the U.S. dropped, spiked, dropped, spiked and then leveled off.
Marshall said it happened a few more times over the next 10 minutes.
“This one event, serving either one building or whatever that data center complex is, impacted the entire region here, and this is what experts are worried about,” he said.
Here’s what Dominion Energy says happened
News4 reached out to Dominion Energy about the power glitch. The power company said a piece of equipment on one of its high-voltage transmission lines that serves data centers failed, knocking it out of service. As a result, the data centers systems switched to backup power.
In a statement to News4, a Dominion Energy spokesperson said, “Dominion Energy did not disconnect area data centers from the grid; the data centers’ own control systems transferred them to backup power for a very short period of time.”
Think of ripples in a puddle when a rock is thrown: The data centers switching their power source is the rock. When that change impacted the water – or the power grid in this case – the major swing in a data center switching off sent ripples through the electric current across half the country.
Ting Labs provided News4 with a graphic showing the scale of the service disruption. The company said orange is really bad and red is worse. Those colors cover more than half of the U.S.
Marshall explained.
“People working on regulations around this, they’re concerned that one of these events in the future could cause the grid to become unstable, and it does not come back to normal in a few minutes or 10 minutes, and we’re dealing with a real big problem,” he said.
That problem could be a blackout.
‘The whole industry is facing things they’ve never faced before’
In this case, Dominion Energy’s safety equipment kicked in, worked as intended and mitigated the issue. But in a county with more than 200 data centers, engineers and leaders say this could be a glimpse of how major the impact could be if just a couple of data centers need to switch their power source.
“The whole industry is facing things they’ve never faced before, and they are doing their best to figure out what’s going on and to do preemptive measures. And I think for the most part, they’ve been able to do that,” said Michael Turner, vice chair of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.
Marshall, with Ting Labs, said that while there’s clear correlation to the data center industry, he stopped short of drawing causation. But Marshall said these types of events are happening more regularly than ever before.
In a Q&A meeting, Loudoun County Board of Supervisors Chair Phyllis Randall explained the framework that made Loudoun the data center capital of the world. News4’s Jackie Bensen reports.
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