If you make sure you’re connected, the writing’s on the wall. But if your grid’s neglected, stumble, you might fall.
Grid connectivity issues are a challenge for hyperscalers placing outsize demands on existing infrastructure, motivating some energy providers and tech giants to pursue new (and old) sources of power.
David Wilson, CEO of Energy Exemplar, told IT Brew that part of the problem is that there’s not a huge level of capacity built into existing infrastructure. And the AI revolution has meant that data centers need far more capacity.
“Grids get built out slowly, you tend to build them out just as you need them,” Wilson said. “These data center loads have come a little out of nowhere—there were data centers, but AI has meant these large loads are trying to find their way into the existing grids that really weren’t planning for that sudden increase in load.”
Delays in grid connectivity are making it more difficult for businesses and utilities alike to manage the demand, according to a Mar. 17 article at Data Center Knowledge. Delays are largely due to power complexity, capacity, permitting, and supply-chain issues. In some states, like Virginia, connecting a data center to the grid can take as long as seven years, Bloomberg reported in August 2024, up from around four years.
Further, as energy research firm Rystad Energy noted in a Feb. 25 review of data center impacts on the US power sector, the delays may have a lot to do with the reality of US transmission availability.
“Over 2 terawatts of potential energy projects, mostly made up of renewable resources, await grid interconnection approval,” Rystad researchers wrote. “Many of these will never achieve commercial operation as, historically, the approval rate for queued projects has hovered around 15%.”
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Stayin’ alive. One solution, offered in a February report by sustainability think tank RMI, is for data centers to combine their efforts with clean energy power plants, for a colocation strategy—which it calls “power couples.” By moving the majority of the power needs of data centers to connected power sources, not the existing grid, these power couples could allow the technology to continue to develop without delay and reduce, or even eliminate, the stress on the local grid.
Ric O’Connell, founding executive director at GridLab, told Canary Media that even a strategy involving connecting clean power to existing grids could pay off. What’s needed, he argued, is to streamline the process.
“There’s a lot of regulatory risk behind this approach that I hope can be mitigated because the benefits are really strong,” O’Connell said.
As Wilson put it to IT Brew, concerns around how to manage data center demands are further complicated because the centers are “not uniformly deployed across the country, they actually tend to be quite concentrated.” That means that while infrastructure is being built out, there’s less opportunity for other states to take advantage. And in a world where there’s a massive expansion in demand, that can make the difference.
“In terms of load addition, this is unprecedented in modern history to see something like these huge step changes,” Wilson said. “An 8% additional load just through data centers is very significant.”