A power line went down outside of Washington, DC, this week. Normally, the grid would only need a few seconds to recover from such an event. But this one took more than 10 minutes because more than 3 gigawatts of data centers stopped drawing power nearly simultaneously. The event caused voltage across the PJM grid to spike from Northern Virginia to Chicago, according to data collected by Ting Labs, a startup that runs an IoT sensor network out of people's electrical sockets. The event didn't cause a blackout, but it did cause lights across the region to flicker. The incident demonstrated the effect that data centers can have on the grid ' an outcome that experts believe will become more frequent. The event echoes one that happened two years ago, also on PJM's grid, and it could foreshadow larger events if data centers aren't built to more elegantly handle disruptions to power supplies. The PJM Interconnection manages grids from New Jersey to Illinois and serves 67 million customers,...
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