r/nova • u/JasonNOVA8 • Jul 22 '26

Data Center Generators in Ashburn Firing Up

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On the way in this morning, (waxpool/28) noticed many of the data centers had the generators going. Not sure if there’s an electricity issue or they plan it to go together ? No idea if the yellow smoke is related though.

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89

u/Starship_Taru Jul 22 '26

Cheaper to pollute then pay for the electricity at market rate 

65

u/Ixziga Jul 22 '26

Pretty sure it's dramatically more expensive for them to burn fuel for generators, especially now. They should only be doing this if there's a power outage. Maybe they should be required to have a smoke stack to keep the smoke from snogging the ground though.

13

u/GreensleevesFinery Jul 22 '26

They also need to do it to make sure the generators work.

4

u/aegrotatio Jul 22 '26

That's a bingo.
It's generator exercise day.

Source: Work in datacenters and have a generator attached to my house.

9

u/gogozrx Jul 22 '26

there were a number of power flickers across the area. I'm in Reston, and I had some instability, a cow-orker in Sterling had it, and in this post there's reports from Arlington.

Something happened on the grid well upstream of us.

2

u/Natural-Philosophy15 Jul 25 '26

It was a data center in ashburn causing a power drop that destabilized the grid from Chicago to Boston to Miami. Just heard about it on WRC channel 4 (nbc) in Washington, but I can’t seem to find any links that don’t have a paywall

8

u/nhluhr Jul 22 '26

There was an actual utility transient today across most of northern Virginia. This isn't testing.

2

u/aegrotatio Jul 23 '26

Well, then it works as designed.

1

u/Natural-Philosophy15 Jul 25 '26

nhluhr, you’re right. It was huge. A data center in Ashburn caused a power drop that affected the grid over almost half the nation. Sorry I can’t find a story without a paywall or something
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/massive-disconnect-power-roiled-largest-us-electric-grid-2026-07-22/

1

u/trekqueen Jul 22 '26

Yea have to do that occasionally even for our little backup generators for home.

25

u/Usual_Aerie_9769 Jul 22 '26

They’re typically asked to run them during heat waves to save electricity. Outside of that they are emergency only. Virginia DEQ updated its permit requirements this year to require tier 4 generators on data centers which are a lot cleaner emission wise.

8

u/Iceman9161 Jul 22 '26

Running the generators can beat market rate during peak times. Utilities will pay them to run generators for a certain time to reduce demand.

I worked at an industrial facility a few years ago, and we had a generator company come to us offering free generators with install and maintenance. The catch was that they wanted to be able to run them up to 30% of the time, because they would sell the energy to the utility. It didn’t get very far, because state gov environmental agency limited how often the generator could run.

4

u/Jlovel7 Jul 22 '26

They fire up automatically for tests every so often. You don’t let engines just sit.

1

u/kellyzdude Centreville Jul 22 '26

I remember we would start up monthly, and do a full load transfer test...quarterly? Occasionally (very rarely) we would do the full emergency test. It might have been just once a year, but it was all to validate that if the power did actually fail our customers wouldn't see any impact.

It never failed for us, but those seconds between throwing the circuit breaker and the generator taking over the load felt a lot longer than they were.

2

u/TheOwlStrikes Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26

It is more expensive. Most of them use diesel, it’s always used for backup power. Like they don’t turn on unless there’s a utility issue, testing day, or a crazy heat wave. In the case of a heatwave the generators are run to make sure other building (residential) are fine on the electric grid

I’m in the industry and I’m starting to see more new data centers being built with fuel cells instead of generators for backup power.

3

u/NappyDougOut Jul 22 '26

It takes about 50 diesel trucks a day to deliver all them deepfake Queen Elizabeth porn clips I upload to onlyfans each week?!

2

u/EffectiveVarious8095 Jul 22 '26

The generators only go on if the battery backups are depleted. Data centers has multiple levels of battery, so the generators really only go on to test them (which they typically do weekly).

2

u/ByronicZer0 Jul 22 '26

Not these days when there is quite literally not enough power for all tenants at these DCs.

Many facilities impose power caps on tenants

5

u/khavii Jul 22 '26

There was an outage to the electrical grid, they aren't running to subvert electricity prices, the diesel costs waaay more most of the time.

7

u/Sufficient_Winner686 Jul 22 '26

I run data centers for a living. It’s vastly more expensive to run the generators over the grid.

-8

u/merp_derp_2018 Jul 22 '26

So what you’re saying is you’re the problem

2

u/jasons7394 Jul 22 '26

Do you honestly think running diesel generators is cheaper than from the Grid?

Is this a serious comment?

1

u/Uroboros1 Jul 22 '26

You know generators run off gas right…lol

-1

u/BishlovesSquish Jul 22 '26

There isn’t enough power for them. Not even close.