AI
“ When we think about onsite power, it’ s not just gas, there are renewables and battery storage”
Anuja Ratnayake Emerging Technologies Executive Electric Power Research Institute( EPRI)
CREDIT: EPRI
“ When this AI boom hit, a lot of developers realised that the fastest way to get to this dispatchable power is natural gas,” he explains.“ That’ s where we started seeing a lot of interest in the gas turbine business.” Yet, gas turbines are only one piece of a complex puzzle. Given the capital-intensive nature of these installations, long-term planning is essential.“ It’ ll take a mix of solutions to bridge to the future, but this is the need of the hour and that’ s what we are responding to,” Mandar says.
The rise of load flexibility and onsite power To solve this timing mismatch, the energy and digital infrastructure sectors are collaborating on innovative grid integration strategies. A prominent player in this space is the Electric Power Research Institute( EPRI), a non-profit dedicated to collaborative energy research.
EPRI is leading an industry-wide initiative known as DC Flex to help data centres act as flexible resources for the grid, rather than just passive consumers.
“ For the first 50 years of our operations, our primary group that we worked with was the traditional energy industry – so, the utilities that serve load,” explains Anuja Ratnayake, Emerging Technologies Executive at EPRI.
But that landscape shifted in early 2024, catching traditional utilities off guard as data centre power demands grew.“ About two years ago, we kept getting questions from our board about how realistic the expected growth from data centres actually was,” Anuja says.“ We kept seeing the resource plans coming out of utilities having to be redone in very short windows of time. These resource plans are normally done either annually or every three years, but the load forecast kept getting changed by big numbers.”
sustainabilitymag. com 93