U.S. grid managers are warning that data centers could trigger blackouts if they suddenly trip offline — and companies are looking to Texas for a solution.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state’s main grid operator, is set to vote on rules Tuesday that would require data centers to stay online during temporary grid disruptions.
If ERCOT’s plan is finalized, data centers could be ordered to disconnect from the grid if they fail to “ride through” power disruptions and are considered a threat reliability. Developers are pushing back, saying ERCOT is overstepping its authority and unfairly targeting artificial intelligence projects and crypto-mining facilities.
The stakes are high.
Texas saw widespread power outages in 2021 during Winter Storm Uri, which killed more than 240 people in the state. Power was cut off to millions of residents amid fears of a widening grid failure, and now Texas is working on a blueprint to avoid a similar disaster caused by data centers. Decisions in Texas may affect outlooks across the country, as developers plan a surge of data centers in red and blue states alike. The idea is to keep problems at one site from destabilizing the wider power system.
“If those cascading things happen, then there could be a collapse of the grid,” said Prasad Enjeti, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M University.
A large data center that goes offline during a temporary grid disruption, Enjeti said, could cause a ripple effect in the grid’s demand-supply balance. And that could cause more data centers to trip offline — creating a larger and larger wave of grid disturbance that could force electric substations and generators to go offline.
ERCOT’s board of the directors is poised to vote on the rules Tuesday and send them to the Public Utility Commission of Texas. If that happens, the PUC could give a final approval later this year.
Ian Rock, chief technology officer at Terraflow Energy, said ERCOT’s proposed rules are already being used as a blueprint by other grid operators across the country. Terraflow manufactures batteries for data centers.
In a meeting with a data center client and another grid operator, Rock said the operator — which he declined to name — told him to just use ERCOT’s proposed parameters when he asked about what criteria the project would need to meet to ride through blips on the grid.
“I think others are watching and taking the criteria,” Rock said. “I’d say ERCOT is in a very market-leading position, which they often are.”
The Southwest Power Pool in the Great Plains does have some rules aimed at preventing data centers from tripping offline to “help avoid system-wide issues,” spokesperson Seth Blomeley said in a statement. But ERCOT is one of the first grid operators facing a wave of new data center projects to develop rules like this with the input of tech companies, said Parag Mitra, a technical leader at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.
PJM Interconnection, the country’s largest grid operator, has been able to weather data centers tripping offline thus far, said spokesperson Jeff Shields. But those issues have had “operational impacts,” Shields wrote in a statement, adding that “we recognize the potential for more serious impacts as large load customers continue to grow.”
Data center developers also say ERCOT’s proposal could cost billions of dollars and take years to redesign facilities so they comply, slowing data center development in Texas and potentially making it unfeasible for them to connect to the grid.
Two trade groups — the Texas Blockchain Council and the Texas Industrial Energy Consumers — have filed comments with ERCOT alleging it lacks the statutory authority to implement the proposed rules, potentially laying the groundwork for a lawsuit.
Aaron Tinjum, vice president of energy at the Data Center Coalition, said in a statement that ERCOT’s rules need to be informed by the data center industry while considering technical limitations of data center equipment and not singling out one industry for “disparate treatment.”
“Like all customers, the data center industry depends on a reliable electricity grid to fulfill its role as a vital backbone of our modern economy,” Tinjum wrote. “In turn, data centers offer numerous reliability benefits to the grid, including significant investments in new energy resources and next-generation technologies.”
‘Lights will flicker’
Blips on the grid are common in the United States, caused by everything from lightning hitting a transmission line to issues with equipment.
Those brief power interruptions can be noticeable inside a home, according to Terraflow’s Rock. The lights may flicker and your TV may shut off, he said.
“You’re going to have the same thing in a data center,” Rock said. “The lights will flicker, but some servers will switch off, and then they have to be rebooted and come back online again.”
Those interruptions can cause a range of problems, such as disrupting credit card transactions and artificial intelligence operations, said Texas A&M’s Enjeti.
“You’ll see in the news, ‘Hey, Amazon Web Services went down, and Facebook is not working’ — that’s likely the result of a data center coming offline or something like that,” Enjeti said.
To prevent that, data centers often are outfitted with software and equipment that can disconnect it from the main power grid within milliseconds of detecting a blip, automatically and almost instantaneously switching to backup power.
But when data centers switch from the grid and to backup generation, their massive power demands also come offline, said Mitra with EPRI.
Most data centers looking to come online in ERCOT plan to use more than 750 megawatts — enough electricity to power roughly 187,500 homes during peak hours. Some could use more than 4,000 MW, which could power 1 million homes.
Generators still produce the same amount of power when large loads instantly go offline, Mitra said, creating an imbalance on the grid where too much power is flowing through transmission lines.
That causes electric frequency — the lifeblood of the grid — to increase. Frequency refers to the number of complete cycles electric currents undergo within one second.
That frequency increase creates more grid instability, which can cause other large data centers nearby to trip offline, Mitra said, increasing the grid’s frequency even more. All of that can happen within tenths of a second, leaving no time for grid operators or generators to react.
In the United States, if any section of the grid dips above or below 60 hertz of frequency, it could result in power outages. To keep the grid at 60 hertz, grid operators bring fast-acting generation online, or take generation offline, to stay in line with demand.
“Your local substation, it should be running at 60 hertz. But suddenly the [data center] load is going away, and it’s got all this power,” Rock said. “So now instead of running at 60 [hertz], it’s running at 60.3 [hertz], and that trips the substation — the breaker turns off.”
The result, Rock said, “that turns off all the rest of the load in that substation, so [the grid disturbance] goes up to the next substation, and you have that cascading type of an event.”
Those cascading events are a worst-case scenario, Mitra said, but that risk is outsize within ERCOT.
ERCOT is vastly smaller than two other main U.S. grids: the Eastern Interconnection and the Western Interconnection.
Larger systems can more easily absorb some data centers tripping offline because of their size. Issues on smaller systems can also pop up much more quickly and be difficult to address, Mitra said.
“The challenge becomes more of a problem for systems that are smaller in size,” Mitra said. “The larger systems, maybe the frequency doesn’t go up to those alarming levels very quickly, although there is the potential for that, and everybody wants to avoid that potential.”
‘As soon as possible’
According to Mitra and Enjeti, there have been no gridwide issues caused by data center ride-through incidents in the United States.
But grid operators across the country have logged dozens of incidents of local reliability issues tied to data centers.
Virginia, which is currently the U.S. data center capital, saw about 1,500 MW of mostly data center demand jump off the grid unexpectedly in July 2024 — enough electricity to power 375,000 homes during peak demand times in Texas.
A postmortem by the North American Electric Reliability Corp., a grid watchdog, found that operators had to step in to reduce power generation to return the grid to normal operations.
Tinjum with the Data Center Coalition said improved communication with NERC, transmission utilities in Virginia and data center operators “has greatly reduced or mitigated load transfer events in the state.”
ERCOT logged at least 28 instances of one or more data centers or crypto-mining facilities tripping offline between Jan. 23, 2023, and Sept. 18, 2025.
The Texas grid operator did not specify how many or which incidents were tied to data centers or crypto-mining facilities. Tinjum said his group was not aware of any reliability events in ERCOT tied to data centers tripping offline.
None of the ERCOT incidents caused systemwide issues, but ERCOT spokesperson Trudi Webster said in a statement that the threat those incidents pose to the system will increase as more data centers plug into the grid.
ERCOT officials estimate data center demand could grow from 7.4 gigawatts in 2026 to more than 228 GW by 2032. One GW is equal to 1,000 MW. The ERCOT region’s all-time peak demand across all power users was set in 2023 at 85.5 GW.
“ERCOT is concerned that the tripping of large loads during voltage or frequency events presents a threat to grid reliability,” Webster said. “Because this threat increases with the number of [data centers and crypto-mining facilities] interconnecting with the grid, mandatory ride-through requirements must be implemented as soon as possible.”
But tech companies aren’t necessarily on board with meeting the technical requirements in ERCOT’s proposed rules.
In comments submitted to ERCOT, Chris Matos, an energy market development strategic negotiator for Google, wrote that the tech giant would need to undertake a “systemic redesign” to be in compliance.
“In order to comply with the proposed ERCOT requirements, the data center industry would likely need to trigger complex, multi-billion dollar redesigns of power supply units or fundamental changes to data center architecture,” Matos said.
Tinjum said in a statement that grid reliability is ultimately the responsibility of grid operators — like ERCOT — and regulators.
But he said the coalition “continues to lean in as an engaged partner to actively recommend and support solutions that advance affordability, reliability, and modern economic growth.”
Arushi Sharma Frank, founder and principal at Luminary Strategies tech consultancy, said data center developers are working to develop new technologies so facilities can more easily and cheaply comply with ride-through requirements. Any setup ERCOT settles on could set the stage for other grid operators to follow suit, she said.
“Texas is acting as the national bellwether, so I haven’t heard surprise from developers in the stakeholder process,” Frank said. “It’s just that with first movers, there’s always more noise and always more to work out in advance.”
