It’s called “curtailment”. Explainer above.
When there is more than enough energy on the grid, and not enough transmission lines to carry it away, or batteries to store it, what happens is generation gets shut down, “curtailed”, in the language of the industry.
Obviously one near term solution is more batteries, but these sometimes get bogged down in permitting. Transmission lines are famously slow to get approval.
One AI company has a suggestion. Onsite, modular AI-grade processing units, that are interconnected with networks of similar units to make larger “virtual” data centers.
Solar plants waste up to 20% of the energy they generate: power produced but never sold or delivered to the grid, an estimated 50-plus terawatt hours a year in the U.S. alone. RELIC taps that stranded electricity at the source, skipping the meter, the fees, and the grid infrastructure that has stalled AI buildout across the country.
“Every solar plant is a latent data center. The power is already there, sitting idle while AI labs wait years for grid connections that may never come,” said William Layden, Co-Founder and CEO of Rune. “We built RELIC to close that gap with compute that’s online in days, powered by energy the grid was throwing away.”
