As heat related power outages surge, things are expected to worsen, with AI-focused data centres sucking up power.
The heatwave currently blanketing two-thirds of the United States with record-setting temperatures is straining the nation’s power system.
On Monday, Con Edison, New York City’s power provider, urged residents to conserve electricity. It reduced power voltage to the borough of Brooklyn by 8 percent as it made repairs; it did the same to areas in the boroughs of Staten Island and Queens yesterday. Thousands also lost power as the grid could not handle the strain.
Comparable outages have been felt around much of the East Coast and Midwest including in the states of Virginia and New Jersey. In Philadelphia and Cleveland, power went out for thousands of customers after severe thunderstorms late last week, and has yet to be restored as the region faces high temperatures.
The national railroad corporation Amtrak reported delays on Tuesday due to speed restrictions caused by the heat on routes that went through Washington, Philadelphia and New York.
Power grid woes
This heatwave is bringing attention to the vulnerability of the power infrastructure in the US.
In the latest annual assessment from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), large parts of the US have insufficient power reserves to operate in “above-normal conditions”, including parts of the Midwest, Texas, New England and southern California.
Heat-related power grid strains have surged in recent years. According to a report from Climate Central released last year, there have been 60 percent more heat-related power outages between 2014-2023 than in the 10 years prior.
This comes amid new but growing pressures on the US power grid, including the prevalence of artificial intelligence data centres and the energy needed to power them. In 2022, in northern Virginia, Dominion Energy warned that data centres there used up so much energy that it might be unable to keep up with surging demand.
For AI data centres, that strain is only set to get more pressing as generative AI booms. It is expected that AI server farms’ power demand will increase to 12 percent by 2030.
There are also more immediate concerns of a cyberthreat from Iranian-backed “hacktivists”, which could target the US power grid at a vulnerable moment to avenge the recent US attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, CNN reported. The US power grid cyberthreat sharing centre has been monitoring the dark web for threats, it said, as the Department of Homeland Security issued a warning on Sunday about potential cyberattacks.
“Both hacktivists and Iranian government-affiliated actors routinely target poorly secured US networks and Internet-connected devices for disruptive cyber attacks,” the advisory said.
In 2023, Iran-linked hacktivists targeted a water authority in Pennsylvania with minimal success. In 2024, US authorities discovered that Iran-associated hackers were behind cyberattacks on US healthcare facilities.
Power grids are particularly at risk, according to a 2024 report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), which said that there are as many as 23,000 to 24,000 susceptible points in the US power grid systems that could be vulnerable to cyberattacks.
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