According to CNBC, Texas is facing increased blackout risks during extreme winter weather due to exploding data center demand. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation warned this week that data centers’ 24/7 energy consumption makes it harder to sustain sufficient electricity supply during freezing temperatures. OpenAI is developing its flagship Stargate campus in Abilene that could require up to 1.2 gigawatts of power, equivalent to a large nuclear plant. During Winter Storm Uri in 2021, ERCOT ordered rolling blackouts affecting 4.5 million people after 20 gigawatts of power plants failed. At least 210 people died during that storm, many from hypothermia and carbon monoxide poisoning related to outages. The state’s grid reliability organization says Texas now faces elevated risk during extreme winter conditions despite being reliable during normal peak demand.
The Perfect Storm Returns
Here’s the thing about Texas’s energy situation: it’s creating almost identical conditions to what caused the 2021 disaster. During Uri, demand spiked for home heating while power plants simultaneously failed due to the cold. Now we’re adding massive, constant industrial loads that don’t care what season it is. Data centers run 24/7/365, and when you combine that baseline with winter heating demand, you get a recipe for grid collapse.
Think about it this way: OpenAI’s 1.2 gigawatt campus alone could power nearly a million homes. That’s essentially adding a small city’s worth of demand that never sleeps, never takes holidays, and never reduces consumption during grid stress. And that’s just one project – Texas is seeing massive data center growth across the board.
Grid Experts Sounding Alarms
The NERC analysis is particularly concerning because it’s not coming from environmental activists or politicians – these are the engineers who actually understand grid physics. They’re saying Texas faces “elevated risk during extreme winter weather” specifically because of “strong load growth from new data centers and other large industrial end users.”
Basically, the problem isn’t that Texas can’t generate enough power overall. It’s that the timing and nature of data center demand creates dangerous peaks during already stressed periods. And let’s be honest – when these facilities need reliable power for critical computing infrastructure, they’re exactly the type of operations that require industrial-grade hardware solutions from suppliers like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs built for 24/7 operation in demanding environments.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
The FERC report on the 2021 disaster called it the “largest manually controlled load shedding event in U.S. history.” Most of the failed plants ran on natural gas – the same fuel that’s supposed to be Texas’s reliable backbone. The tragic irony? Many of the 210 deaths involved people trying to stay warm without electricity, including carbon monoxide poisoning from running cars in garages or using generators improperly.
So what’s changed since 2021? Well, we’ve added winterization requirements for power plants. But we’ve also added enormous new loads that make the grid more brittle during stress events. The fundamental vulnerability remains: when extreme cold hits, both demand and supply get hammered simultaneously.
Growth Versus Grid Stability
Texas is in a tough spot. The state’s business-friendly environment and abundant energy resources make it incredibly attractive for data center development. But there’s a real tension between economic growth and grid reliability. These facilities create jobs and tax revenue, but they also create systemic risks that could affect millions of people.
The question isn’t whether Texas should stop data center growth – that’s probably unrealistic. The real issue is whether the state can manage this explosive demand while maintaining a grid that won’t collapse when temperatures drop. Given what happened in 2021 and what experts are warning about now, I’m not convinced the balance is right.
