[bob1029]

I'm a bit confused about why this is a serious engineering problem.

If a gigawatt class DC suddenly needs to take its sensitive IT loads off grid, it could be designed with load banks on site to stand in for the IT load. These would be exceptional use only, so the specific cooling technology (obviously we want to boil water) is not much of an ecological concern. A gigawatt will vaporize ~100 gallons of water per second. How long until the grid can adapt? Five minutes? That's not exactly a heroic amount of water for these projects.

[burnt-resistor]

> could be designed with load banks on site to stand in for the IT load

Yes, but that's not what's happening. These giant loads are suddenly going offline and are making it the transmission and generation networks' problem. The DCs aren't going to pay for it when they can socialize the costs and problems onto others.

The most obvious answer is these big loads need FFR and M-FFR BESS (battery) capacity near them or on-site to decouple and absorb these huge transient load swings into something the grid can handle. ERCOT should set additional rules that large load customers must use load smoothing rather than simply dumping load at auto-reclosers/auto-cutouts. Not doing so forces the entire grid to be at risk of low inertia transient over-generation.

[ProllyInfamous]

>why is[/]this a serious engineering problem[?]

Because the Texian grid-operator (ERCOT) is predominantly isolated from the Eastern & Western US grids [†], serving mostly-just Texans – this is to avoid US Federal regulations, by being an only-intrastate entity (technically, which is: the worst kind of "correct" [∑]). This is a socially-engineered "problem".

This means their needs for maintaining grid inertia (which frequency is a measure-er of) are more difficult, as Texas cannot just purchase any substantial/meaningful electricity – everything must be generated in-house.

Worse, the lack of Federal regulations means ERCOT/Texas can create their own rules/regulations/markets for the management of electrical infrastructure. Texas chose to make (IMHO) the most-purely crony-capitalistic market [for buy/sell of MWhours] in worldwide existance – which leads to decannual winterstorm Disasters (totaling hundreds of BBillion$ in damages / hundreds dead). The losses from wasted silicon-ingot depositions (alone) are staggering $,,,.00 – just another cost of doing business within Texas's jurisdiction [ß].

After 2021's storm, some "free market" customers were left with a week of billing costing more than the year's remainder!.

Abbott will just blame the windmills and not a cost-incentive fee-structure which does not incentivize cold-weather preventative maintainance. In fact, it does the opposite (since electricity can 25X price-increase). "Tell me the incentive and I'll tell you the outcome."

[∑] having grown up and been schooled primarily in Texas, I think the best review I ever agreed with was: "The [L]one Star State" – Texceptionalism will kill us all

[†] small DC-DC grid-ties (altogether a low, single-digit percentage of ERCOT's overall capacity) exist with both grids, as well as another smaller with Mexico

[ß] which is why most hospitals/datacenters have their own diesel/LNG generators, on-site – in Texas these have even less regulations because: "temporary" see (e.g.): Tesla's multiple Texas facilities' backupsystems – enormous point-source pollutors

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If you want a good breakdown of the 2021 Texas storm's decimation of ERCOT/Texas/electricity, look for the great logs reddit /u/redditmudder did (in realtime) as this disaster was unfolding. I cannot remember exactly how low the frequency got... but I think we were closer to EU [50hz] than US [60hz] – as grid operators REAPED profits* from their failing infrastructure driving electricity orders-of-magnitude higher. This is all public information; it wasn't "windmills."