AEMC draws up electricity rules for data centres in AI boom

The Australian Energy Market Commission is considering new rules to manage an expected influx of high-capacity data centres in coming years, concerned at how these facilities would respond in a grid power outage.

The commission is wanting, in part, to avoid a domestic repeat of an incident in the United States last year where 60 data centres in Virginia automatically disconnected from the grid during a “disturbance” - adversely impacting the grid and electricity market.

AEMC chair Anna Collyer said that artificial intelligence is anticipated to drive data centre growth in Australia.

"The rise of artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented demand for data centres in Australia, with some facilities potentially requiring as much electricity as small cities," Collyer said.

"[We’re proposing] new standards to ensure these facilities can respond appropriately during power system disturbances and don't inadvertently make problems worse during system events."

In the US incident, “60 data centres consuming 1500 MW of power disconnected simultaneously during a system disturbance, compounding grid stability issues,” the AEMC said in its consultation paper. [pdf]

A post-incident investigation found “the data centres all shared a common design feature: the protection system included a function that counts the number of faults that occur within a preset duration and disconnects if the count breaches a pre-specified threshold.”

“The [electricity] system operator was unaware of this design feature prior to the event materialising,” the AEMC noted, with the facilities having to be manually reconnected to the grid to stabilise it.

Guidance from the end of 2023 suggests that Australia could host several data centres capable of between 100MW and 600MW.

It would only take a “large load of approximately >100MW …  to disconnect from the power system in response to a high-frequency event [to] further destabilise system frequency, thereby worsening the disturbance and risking broader impacts on electricity supply,” the commission noted.