We’ve entered the age of eking out and leveraging energy from every corner, a skill particularly suited to the decentralized grid.
Home heaters, cars, smart electric panels, and other community resources can serve as flexible loads to help our power system meet growing demand from AI and electrification.
It turns out data centers can make themselves more flexible, too, significantly easing the burden they place on the electric grid and shortening their now-long wait to interconnect.
In a new report, Camus Energy, encoord, and Princeton University’s ZERO Lab offer a two-part solution to what it describes as the current, frustrating process of “build first, connect later” that data centers face.
The first part requires that the data center secure a flexible grid connection, meaning it can receive both firm and conditional service. Doing so allows the data center to use grid power during normal conditions and on-site or co-located services when the grid is strained.
Next, the data centers must participate in a build-your-own-capacity program. Also known as BYOC, these programs allow the data center to use virtual power plants (VPP), on-site generation or other resources to procure the accredited capacity needed to meet firm-service requirements. These resources are generally faster to secure than new utility-scale power.
The report authors undertook what they describe as the first publicly available study “to combine real utility transmission system data, system-level capacity expansion modeling, and site-level capacity optimization to evaluate how flexibility can accelerate data center interconnections.” They offer it as a blueprint for others to follow.
Their two key findings were:
- Flexible data centers can connect 3-5 years faster
- Flexible grid connections and BYOC significantly reduce and internalize incremental supply costs
“The answer to whether flexibility can help is a resounding ‘yes.’ Our results showed that a small amount of local flexibility could enable loads [data centers] to connect 3-5 years sooner. Further, onsite power solutions, when paired with procured capacity from renewable, battery, or VPP resources, can enable sites to entirely offset the additional system costs of adding new load,” wrote Astrid Atkinson, CEO and co-founder of Camus Energy on LinkedIn. “The result is a better grid — which can support a lot more load, keep energy and capacity prices stable, and in which new flexibility provides increased system reliability and resilience.”
The full report, Flexible Data Centers: A Faster, More Affordable Path to Power, is available here.