Texas Is Preparing To Cut Off Power To Data Centers During Grid Emergencies

Over the Fourth of July, deadly floods swept across central Texas, disrupting infrastructure and causing widespread outages. Meanwhile, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has already seen multiple price spikes and conservation alerts — not because there wasn’t enough power, but because we couldn’t move it where it was needed.

These aren’t isolated events. It’s not just a Texas problem.

Just days after the shutoff planning was announced, the U.S. Department of Energy warned that blackout risks across the country could rise 100-fold by 2030.

All of this points to a deeper vulnerability: We’re still running the grid with tools and assumptions built for a different era — one with fewer storms, slower load growth and no massive data centers. 

Texas’s new normal demands smarter, faster and more adaptive grid operations. Long-term infrastructure investments are critical, but they won’t arrive in time to manage the next three summers.

Texas has made real progress in building new generation capacity, especially in solar, storage and wind. But the wires that carry that power haven’t changed. More importantly, the way we operate the grid hasn’t evolved to match the demands of either changing weather patterns or electrical load growth.

Now, surging demand from industrial expansion, electrification and AI data centers is doubling the strain. ERCOT’s own projections show that power demand in Texas may nearly double by 2030. And, other regions aren’t immune.

• The Midcontinent Independent System Operator recently green-lit a $22 billion transmission buildout to relieve rising congestion.
• The California Independent System Operator saw renewable curtailments surge nearly 30% last year.
• The PJM Interconnection anticipates 3% to 4% annual peak load growth through 2035 driven by data centers and expects up to 70 GW of demand over the next 15 years.
• Nationally, U.S. demand is projected to climb about 16% in five years — a pace not seen since the 1980s. 

That means more stress on an already-congested transmission system — one still being managed with decades-old assumptions about heat, wind and demand.

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