The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, is changing the way it evaluates its transmission capacity to connect data centers, cryptocurrency miners and other "large loads" to the grid.
Texas could soon lead the nation in the number of data centers, as reported by theTexas Tribune.
As the state sees rapid growth in this industry, ERCOT has been re-evaluating its planning processes for these facilities, according toInside Climate News.
"All that AI magic happens at a data center," ERCOT’s Vice President of Interconnection & Grid Analysis Jeff Billo said at an ERCOT meeting Tuesday. "There’s some data center somewhere that is doing that magic, and a lot of those data centers, as most of you are aware, are being built in Texas."
Whenever a company wants to connect a data center or other large load to the Texas power grid, it has to undergo a transmission study to assess whether the grid has sufficient wiring to transmit power to the data center or other facility.
"How do we move that power from the generation to those large load customers? So it’s more about how can we make sure that we are reliable — from a wires perspective — integrating these large loads into the system," Billo explained during Tuesday's meetings.
Currently, these transmission studies are completed on an individual basis. But by the time that study is completed, it may no longer be valid because it didn't take into account other facilities that requested to join the grid in the meantime.
"Now we have created this study doom loop, as some people have called it, where we are continually having to restudy those large loads to make sure that we can reliably integrate them on the system," Billo said.
Under the new planning system, ERCOT will complete periodic transmission studies in batches, allowing the state to evaluate the impacts of integrating multiple large loads into the grid at the same time.
"There are a lot of companies that are interested in doing business in Texas, which means there are a lot of people whose livelihoods are impacted by the work that we do here to integrate those large loads," Billo said.
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