DERVOS Sneak Peak - Big DERs Energy
Rad or Fad? Co-located DERs for massive data centers.
Every year our goal with DERVOS is to put on the best damn show we possibly can. We’ve been really cooking for everyone this year, so we’re excited to take the cover off one of the main themes we’ll be exploring and the amazing guests who we’ve found to help out.
Big DERs Energy (BDE)
Co-located DERs are enabling massive data center growth.
Many analysts confidently proclaim that today’s moment, where AI data centers are being powered by on-site systems, is just the fleeting expression of several unfortunately timed constraints. The distributed energy folks are going to have their fun for a few years, but soon enough the grid and its institutions will remember how to expand, at which point things will go back to normal.
What if that’s not true? What if it was always the destiny for large new loads to be powered by, or at least enabled by, on-site power systems? Up until last year, electricity demand hadn’t grown in the US for nearly a quarter-century. And our last big wave of growth happened well before that, at a time when power generation technology and the electric stack were less mature.
Things couldn’t be more different today. We have massive solar and battery manufacturing capacity that is deployed to projects quickly and at low cost. We have natural gas prime movers that are standardized, modular, and highly performant. We have sophisticated controls and power distribution hardware that command Odin’s spark in ways never seen before.
And despite the common assertion that data centers require 100% capacity factors, it appears even these large new loads themselves may act as distributed energy resources, flexing their might when it matters most.
What if things wont return to normal? What if THIS is the new normal?
Speakers
To settle this question we’ve pulled together a few of our favorite people at the bleeding edge of the industry:
Cully Cavness, Co-Founder & COO of Crusoe, and his team are building the Stargate effort for OpenAI — a series of truly massive data center campuses in Texas and elsewhere that will be powered by gas turbines, batteries, solar, wind, and the grid.
Hallie Carrao, of Google’s Advanced Energy Labs, leads how DERs can be integrated into Google’s immense data center fleet, in addition to how the data centers themselves can be used as DERs.
Sean Jones, Tesla’s lead for Megapack at Data Centers, was hands on at xAI’s installation of large-scale battery storage that made the AI super computer known as Colossus possible, and has been leading Tesla’s efforts to educate data center operators, power system operators, and regulators about the value of co-located batteries at data centers.
Tyler Norris, James B. Duke Fellow at Duke University, recently co-authored Rethinking Load Growth: Assessing the Potential for Integration of Large Flexible Loads in US Power Systems, which demonstrates that AI data center growth may be accommodated via load flexibility. Since its release, Tyler’s insights have driven the load growth discourse, both on the load and generator interconnection side.
Duncan Campbell, co-host of DER Task Force and VP of Data Center Solutions at Scale Microgrids, will moderate the panel. Alongside Stripe and Paces, Duncan recently co-authored Fast, scalable, clean, and cheap enough, a white paper that explored how off-grid microgrids with high penetrations of solar can enable data center growth.
TWe can’t wait to see you all there. We’re about 5 weeks out and we’ve sold out every year, so reserve your spot asap!
like distributed computing never went back to centralized (my first nutty career!), nor will DERs give it back to the big central grid….it will serve to make the grid better/smarter/resilient and, thus, the overall power system better.
I'll be eager to join this DERVOS discussion in a few weeks!