High-voltage braking resistors to stabilize gigawatt data centers

The authors propose using high voltage circuit breaker operated braking resistors at data center transmission substations to enhance grid resilience against sudden loss of large, voltage-sensitive IT loads from gigawatt-scale data centers.

• The paper models a 500 MW–2 GW data center load cluster on a 345 kV network, showing that inserting braking resistors for 0.25–0.85 seconds reduces rate of change of frequency, mitigates voltage rise, and allows primary governor response and capacitor switching to restore steady state without modifying generators.
• The approach uses multi-stage braking resistors (for inverter-rich systems) switched by high-speed circuit breakers, is tested across different synchronous machine and inverter-based resource mixes, is deemed robust and scalable with cluster size/data center growth, and is accepted for publication in the 2025 IEEE ETFG conference proceedings under a CC BY 4.0 license.