New York, now Texas (!) have tapped the brakes (but not closed the door) on Data Center development, causing a bit of anxiety in the industry.
Above, a Data Center development CEO has a suggestion for community benefits that could include rebuilding electric grids, building schools, buying fire trucks, even zeroing out local property taxes.
Below, former Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, appearing on Jigar Shah’s “Energy Empire” podcast, made the case for Data Centers purchase of batteries for local homes and businesses. These could become the foundation for Virtual Power Plants that offer tremendous benefits for clean energy and grid stability.
In Graholm’s State of Michigan, regulators brokered an agreement between utility DTE and Oracle, which is building a hyper scale Data Center south of Ann Arbor, to provide 1.4 Gigawatts of grid scale battery storage, at their expense, as a major benefit to the statewide grid, and a key building block for climate goals.
(I’ll keep posting this until everyone sees it and gets it)
I’m very skeptical about battery schemes, but I do think there are probably a lot of non mission critical processes that could be slowed or halted in a grid emergency. Perhaps grid buffering could be a valuable service for data centers to offer and be a worthwhile extra for grid customers and operators to pay for.