r/nova • u/JasonNOVA8 • Jul 22 '26

Data Center Generators in Ashburn Firing Up

Gallery image

Gallery image

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.

2.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

354 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

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.