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    ERCOT approves technical permit for Wind Power-connected Texas Data Center

    Dec. 27, 2022
    The 50-MW data center will power Bitcoin mining and cloud computing activites, all connected to a nearby wind farm and also powered off excess electricity on the grid
    Captured YouTube image featuring Soluna Computing CEO John Belizaire at the Project Dorothy data center.
    Captured YouTube image featuring Soluna Computing CEO John Belizaire at the Project Dorothy data center.

    The system operator for the Texas grid has approved the technical grid connection aspects of a new data center which will be powered by an adjacent wind farm beginning next year.

    The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has signed off on the flexible load planning process for Project Dorothy. The 50-MW data center will power Bitcoin mining and cloud computing activites, all connected to a nearby wind farm and also powered off excess electricity on the grid.

    Now Project Dorothy, owned by Soluna Computing, moves into the modeling phase with the anticipation of going into operation in February. ERCOT reportedly marked that as the earliest date to permit energization of the facility.

    “Project Dorothy doubles our operational footprint, and this approval to move to ERCOT’s modeling phase sets a clear path for our production load forecast date,” Michael Toporek, CEO of parent Soluna Holdings, said in a statement. “ I’m extremely proud of the hard work and collaboration of our team and partners to get us to this next phase of the process. . . Project Dorothy is a repeatable blueprint for future projects for which we can learn.”

    The site is named after Dorothy Vaughan, an African American mathematician who worked for NASA as the organization’s first black manager. She retired from NASA in 1971 and died in 1989.

    Vaughan was a featured character in the film, “Hidden Figures” and portrayed by Octavia Spencer, who was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2017.

    “She saw problems and worked to solve them using practical, real means. There’s a windfarm in Texas that has some real problems,” reads the Soluna Computing webpage on Vaughan and Project Dorothy. “We’re solving them with the mindset we imagine Dorothy would use.”

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    ERCOT, the wind farm owners, Soluna and Project Dorothy site managers must work together to coordinate physical logistics and grid resiliency issues as they move toward energization of the data center. One key goal is to engage in eliminating waste energy from curtailments in capacity due to grid congestion of generation assets such as power plants.

    Soluna hopes to add another 50-MW data center to the site in the near future. The company’s long-term strategy would extend beyond Bitcoin mining into graphics processing unit cloud computing applications, eventually for pharmaceutical research, graphics rendering, artificial intelligence and machine learning.

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    (Rod Walton, senior editor for EnergyTech, is a 14-year veteran of covering the energy industry both as a newspaper and trade journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]).

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    About the Author

    Rod Walton, EnergyTech Managing Editor | Senior Editor

    For EnergyTech editorial inquiries, please contact Managing Editor Rod Walton at [email protected].

    Rod Walton has spent 15 years covering the energy industry as a newspaper and trade journalist. He formerly was energy writer and business editor at the Tulsa World. Later, he spent six years covering the electricity power sector for Pennwell and Clarion Events. He joined Endeavor and EnergyTech in November 2021.

    Walton earned his Bachelors degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma. His career stops include the Moore American, Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise, Wagoner Tribune and Tulsa World. 

    EnergyTech is focused on the mission critical and large-scale energy users and their sustainability and resiliency goals. These include the commercial and industrial sectors, as well as the military, universities, data centers and microgrids. The C&I sectors together account for close to 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

    He was named Managing Editor for Microgrid Knowledge and EnergyTech starting July 1, 2023

    Many large-scale energy users such as Fortune 500 companies, and mission-critical users such as military bases, universities, healthcare facilities, public safety and data centers, shifting their energy priorities to reach net-zero carbon goals within the coming decades. These include plans for renewable energy power purchase agreements, but also on-site resiliency projects such as microgrids, combined heat and power, rooftop solar, energy storage, digitalization and building efficiency upgrades.

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