Flexibility is getting a lot more attention as a data center power strategy. It provides one answer to help power up data centers without waiting years and spending billions to build massive new electricity transmission and generation capacity.
The latest indicator of the flexibility priority comes from NVIDIA, Google, and Emerald AI, who announced the AI Energy Management Alliance (AEMA) on Sept. 16. The mission of these three founders, along with 18 launch partner companies, is to modernize power system planning and operations to take full advantage of data centers’ flexibility potential to make the grid stronger and more reliable.
Flexibility comes down to being able to take a data center workload off the electrical grid when the grid is at risk of running out of capacity.
Such shutdowns might be needed just 100 hours out of a year, at times of peak system demand. If power companies could count on data centers to reduce their power use at those rare peak moments, they wouldn’t have to build new transmission and generation capacity to serve a higher peak load, so they could let data centers connect to the grid sooner and without investing in a massive buildout.
If you want to go deep on this flexibility issue, I’ll suggest two ways: Read up via the white paper below, or meet up at our Data Center World Power event, next week in Dallas.
Read up: In a white paper commissioned by Google for this AEMA launch, authors from Brattle Group make the case that data center flexibility could drive much more efficient use of existing transmission. The ideas they illustrate include how flexible data center workloads and “proximate pairings” (putting new generation close to large loads, thus requiring less transmission) could let power companies connect data centers to the grid sooner without excessive transmission upgrades.
Meet up: At Data Center World Power (Sept. 21-23 in Dallas), leaders from six of the 21 companies involved in launching AEMA are speaking at the event: Google, NVIDIA, NRG, Calibrant, Camus, and Voltus. Experts from across the data center and power ecosystem will discuss how they’re working to solve the industries’ toughest power challenges, sharing new collaborations, partnerships, and technologies that create flexibility and improve electric grid utilization. You’ll leave with an understanding of how data centers can help solve grid challenges, not just create them.
Here are links to that white paper and to the Data Center World Power event. I hope to see you in Dallas next week!
Chris Murphy, Content Director, Data Center World