We’ve been noticing minor power blips, blinks, increasingly growing over the past 10 months or so in Darnestown, Maryland – no enough to trigger UPS switchover, but enough to notice something is changing, something is wrong.. No official explanation given, until now. — “Just before 8 a.m. the electricity flickered on and off for about ten minutes. It was the result of data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia. …engineers say this seemingly small blip is a sign our infrastructure is in danger. Experts say the cracks in our infrastructure grid are starting to show, as the data center industry consumes electricity at a rate the world has never experienced.“
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“A 2026 power-engineering study found that hyperscale data centers behave not merely as electrical loads, but as vast power-electronics systems whose rapidly fluctuating server demands can excite grid oscillations and propagate disturbances across interconnected networks. Far from a fringe “dirty electricity” claim, the research suggests data centers may interact with the power grid in ways fundamentally different from traditional industrial facilities, raising serious new concerns about resonance, stability, reliability.”
Loudoun Co. data centers linked to power flickering across half the U.S. | NBC4 Washington
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News 4. Something happened on Wednesday morning that you might have noticed but didn't bat an eye. It happened inside
0:1111 secondsthousands of your homes and businesses, and experts say it's a sign the cracks are starting to show in our power
0:1818 secondsinfrastructure. Just before 8 a.m. the electricity flickered on and off for about ten minutes. It was the result of data centers in Loudoun County,
0:2626 secondsVirginia. In a story you will only see on News 4, Northern Virginia bureau reporter Drew Wilder explains why engineers say this seemingly small blip
0:3535 secondsis a sign our infrastructure is in danger. Experts say the cracks in our infrastructure grid are starting to show, as the data center industry
0:4343 secondsconsumes electricity at a rate the world has never experienced.
0:4646 secondsWednesday morning, that crack became visible to millions of Americans inside their own homes. In a seemingly small way, this is what experts are
0:5454 secondsworried about, right? That data centers are such a big load on the grid that they can have detrimental impact on the
1:031 minute, 3 secondssurrounding grid. Bob Marshall runs Ting Labs and sells this little device that plugs into your wall to monitor your home's electricity, and it can alert you if something's awry.
1:121 minute, 12 secondsIt's all to prevent an electrical fire. You plug it in, connect it to wi fi. It takes 30 million electrical measurements every second. And
1:191 minute, 19 secondswith millions of these devices in homes across the country, Marshall's data collection saw something that he says should be a concern for all of us, he
1:271 minute, 27 secondssays. At 756 Wednesday morning, our lights flickered because the electricity supply dropped, then spiked, then dropped, then spiked before leveling off about ten minutes later.
1:361 minute, 36 secondsElectric grid instability felt from Chicago to Boston to Miami, the source. He says. Data center. Alley. This one event,
1:451 minute, 45 secondsserving either one building or whatever that data center complex is in in Ashburn, impacted the entire region here.
1:581 minute, 58 secondsAnd, you know, this is what experts are worried about, Dominion energy tells News 4. A transmission line servicing a data center failed. So the data
2:062 minutes, 6 secondscenters switched to their own power supply, temporarily leaving the grid. In a statement to News 4, a Dominion Energy spokesperson said, quote, Dominion Energy did not
2:142 minutes, 14 secondsdisconnect area data centers from the grid. The data centers own control systems transferred them to backup power for a very short period of time. Think of
2:212 minutes, 21 secondsit like ripples in water. The data center is switching their power sources the rock. And when that change impacts the water or the power grid. In
2:292 minutes, 29 secondsthis analogy, the massive shift in electricity load sent ripples through the electric current across half the country.
2:362 minutes, 36 secondsTing labs provided News 4 with this graphic that shows the scale of the service disruption.
2:402 minutes, 40 secondsThe company says the colors on this map should all stay the same. The big changes in colors means there's a change in electric frequency. It covers more than half of the United
2:492 minutes, 49 secondsStates. People are working on regulations around. This is.
2:522 minutes, 52 secondsThey're concerned that one of these events in the future could cause the grid to become unstable, and it does not come
3:003 minutesback to normal in a few minutes or ten minutes. And we're dealing with a real big problem.
3:063 minutes, 6 secondsThat real big problem could be a blackout. In this case, Dominion Energy Safety Equipment kicked in, worked as intended, and mitigated the
3:143 minutes, 14 secondsissue. The whole industry is facing things they've never faced before, and they are doing their best to figure out what's going on and institute preemptive measures. And I
3:223 minutes, 22 secondsthink for the for the most part, they've been able to do that.
3:253 minutes, 25 secondsBob Marshall says there is clear correlation between the data center boom and the instability in our electric grid, though he stopped short of drawing causation. But he
3:333 minutes, 33 secondsdoes say that these types of events are happening more and more