ASHBURN, Va. (7News) — A power issue in Ashburn, Virginia, last week is raising concerns about whether data centers could hurt the reliability of the power grid not just by using too much energy, but also by suddenly using too little.
The incident happened last Wednesday when a transmission line in Ashburn experienced a fault that automatically caused it to go out of service, A spokesperson for Dominion Energy told 7News. As a result, several data centers chose to go off the grid and switch to backup power.
According to PJM, an organization that oversees the movement of electricity in 13 states and D.C., data centers disconnected 3,000 megawatts of power from the grid…