TCU 360

Already stretched to meet the demands of a growing population, the Texas power grid will likely be taxed by technology too.

The Stargate project, which plans to invest $500 billion in AI infrastructure over the next four years, is building its initial data center in Abilene.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) expects these data centers to push peak demand to nearly double from 85 GW in 2020 to 150 GW in 2030. The state will have to balance this demand with the needs of a rapidly expanding population. Texas’ population grew to 3,945,452 from 2012 to 2022, marking a 15.1% increase in population according to the Texas Comptroller. 

To compensate for the upcoming demands from data centers the Texas Senate Committee on Business and Commerce held a meeting with experts to hear their insight on the situation. The committee specifically honed in on how these data center demands for power might affect Texas residents. 

“We don’t want to be asking residential customers to rotate off even for 15 minutes while a large data center stays on,” Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the public utility of Texas, said when addressing how power will be handled in emergency scenarios. Data centers currently do not participate in ERCOT’s high-demand response program according to the committee’s report.

“They’ll come with their back-up power so that if we are in an emergency we can get the benefit of all those megawatts in the existing generation fleet and those data centers can still operate,” Gleeson followed up with. 

“Having something that carves out a different definition for that type of load so that it can be treated differently is probably what’s missing today,” Woody Rickerson, senior vice president, and chief operating officer, stated when offering a solution on how to address data center energy load demands. The main problem both men focused on was the potential of the power grid being harmed by the data centers.

To meet the rising demands Texas has attracted many types of energy companies to the state to help bolster its energy production. These efforts have made Texas the top oil and gas state in the U.S. producing 42% of crude oil and 27% of marketed natural gas according to the Texas Comptroller. Natural gas itself provides 41.8% of the electric generating capacity in Texas making it the largest single source of power in the state.