Guidehouse
Robyn Link is a director in Guidehouse’s Communities, Energy & Infrastructure segment. With more than twenty years of experience in the energy industry, she has partnered with eighty-plus utility companies in North America to create and deliver new, transformational load management and customer engagement solutions that drive results and resolve significant business challenges.
How do you see the utility’s role in energy efficiency and electrification evolving amid significant load growth accelerated by data center buildouts?
Robyn Link: Utilities are at the forefront of addressing the challenges that come with managing high-density data center loads. They must solve issues for both grid and customer needs, while providing reliable and sustainable power. As data center demands surge, their role in energy efficiency and electrification could evolve in several ways.
Enhance Grid Efficiency – Utilities should deploy smart grid technologies. With real-time data, sensors, and automation, they can reduce energy waste and better predict and monitor energy flows, manage grid conditions, and optimize power distribution to accommodate growing data center energy demands.
Advance Energy Efficiency with Liquid Cooling – Utilities should develop incentive programs encouraging data centers to adopt energy-efficient cooling technologies like liquid cooling and direct-to-chip cooling. By improving operational efficiencies and easing grid constraints, these technologies reduce overall energy consumption significantly more than traditional air-cooling methods do.
Target High-Usage Data Centers – Programs should target data centers with the highest potential for energy savings. The average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of U.S. data centers is about 1.5. High-efficiency data centers can currently achieve a PUE close to 1.1, which demonstrates a significant opportunity for improved efficiency.
Support Electrification and Demand Response – Utilities can create win-win situations by offering incentives to data centers to shift power usage during peak periods, which then allows utilities to manage grid capacity more effectively, while potentially reducing the need for costly new infrastructure. Utilities can also provide energy storage options that support grid stability and give data centers more flexibility in managing their operations – in turn avoiding high demand charges.
Combinations of Renewable and Energy Storage – Utilities can help data centers electrify with renewable power and energy storage to build in redundancy and backups. They can offer tailored green energy tariffs or broker power purchase agreements that fuel data centers with solar, wind, or hydropower.
They can also develop offerings for microgrids, storage, and distributed energy resources, ensuring reliable, sustainable energy wherever data centers are.
Utilities are actively shaping energy’s future. They are leading the charge to power the data-driven world of tomorrow while ensuring that energy use remains reliable, smart, clean, and efficient.
