Focus on USA | Data centre power Challenges and opportunities


EPRI has launched a new initiative — DCFlex — to explore how data centres can support the electric grid, enable better asset utilisation, and contribute to the clean energy transition. The initiative’s founding members include Compass Datacenters, Constellation Energy, Duke Energy, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), Google, Meta, New York Power Authority, NRG Energy, NVIDIA, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), PJM Interconnection, Portland General Electric, QTS Data Centers, Southern Company, and Vistra Corp.


After years of flat load growth on the US grid, electricity demand is rising across the economy as numerous factors – including industrial onshoring, electrification of transport, digitisation, and the adoption of AI – converge, EPRI notes. This growing demand presents unique opportunities in the journey towards net zero and ensuring reliability across the electric grid, says EPRI. Technology companies have historically been a key driver in accelerating commercialisation of clean energy and innovative collaborations throughout the energy ecosystem. Their efforts and ambitions toward net-zero and clean energy in collaboration with electricity providers sharing these goals can be a driving force in addressing the growing demand and building a more reliable, resilient, affordable, and sustainable electricity grid of the future, EPRI believes.


Led by EPRI, DCFlex will co-ordinate real- world demonstrations of flexibility in a variety of


Visualisation of what will be Meta’s largest data centre, to be constructed in Richland Parish, Louisiana, on the 1400 acre Franklin Farm “mega site.” It will be powered by Entergy Louisiana, which will build three combined cycle units, total installed capacity 2260 MW (Image: Entergy/Meta)


existing and planned data centres and electricity markets, creating reference architectures and providing shared learnings to enable broader adoption of flexible operations that benefit all electricity consumers.


Specifically, DCFlex will establish five to ten flexibility hubs, demonstrating innovative data centre and power supplier strategies that enable operational and deployment flexibility, streamline grid integration, and transition


backup power solutions to grid assets. Demonstration deployment will begin in the first half of 2025, and testing could last until 2027. The initiative is an outgrowth of discussions with the US Department of Energy (DOE) and many in the data centre, technology, utility, and research communities that informed the development of recommendations to DOE from the Secretary’s Energy Advisory Board (SEAB) earlier this year (Powering AI and Data Center


Key messages from EPRI white paper, Powering intelligence: analyzing artificial intelligence and data center energy consumption


In the United States, powering data centres, providing clean energy for manufacturing, supporting industrial onshoring, and electrifying transportation are driving renewed electric load growth. Clusters of new, large point loads are testing the ability of electric companies to keep pace. Data centres are one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. Between 2017 and 2021, electricity used by Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — the main providers of commercially available cloud computing and digital services — more than doubled. A fundamental uncertainty in projecting data centre load growth comes from the broad emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in business and daily life—punctuated by the explosion into public consciousness of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, released in November 2022. While AI applications are estimated to use only 10%–20% of data centre electricity today, that percentage is growing rapidly. AI models are typically much more energy-intensive than the data retrieval, streaming, and communications applications that drove data centre growth over the past two decades. At 2.9 watt- hours per ChatGPT request, AI queries are estimated to require


10x the electricity of traditional Google queries, which use about 0.3 watt-hours each; and emerging, computation-intensive capabilities such as image, audio, and video generation have no precedent. To provide an early assessment of potential data centre load growth at the national level, EPRI has developed low, moderate, high, and higher growth scenarios for data centre loads from 2023 to 2030. Data centres grow to consume 4.6% to 9.1% of US electricity generation annually by 2030 versus an estimated 4% today.


While the national-level growth estimates are significant, it is even more striking to consider the geographic concentration of the industry and the local challenges this growth can create. Today, fifteen states account for 80% of the US national data centre load, with data centres estimated to comprise a quarter of Virginia’s electric load in 2023. Concentration of demand is also evident globally, with data centres projected to make up almost one-third of Ireland’s total electricity demand by 2026. With the shift to cloud computing and AI, new data centres are growing in size. It is not unusual to see new centres being built with capacities from 100 to 1000 MW.


16 | January/February 2025| www.modernpowersystems.com


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