"The North American transmission watchdog warns of cascading outages if the largest data centers aren’t regulated."
"North America’s electric grid watchdog is acting with urgency to guard against widespread power outages stemming from the volatile energy demand of data centers.
The North American Electric Reliability Corp., the grid’s not-for-profit security monitor, is moving to draft new standards for large artificial intelligence computing hubs that could lead to regulation of their operations. A NERC committee is expected to initiate the project Wednesday, seeking final approval by the end of the year.
A recent NERC white paper says the extreme power fluctuations during the training of AI models, when power demand can swing by hundreds of megawatts in an instant, is a “high likelihood, high impact” risk. It’s a threat that could potentially throw carefully calibrated power grids out of balance and lead to uncontrolled, cascading outages."
