A new report has determined that data center operators could unlock up to 76GW of new capacity in the US by curtailing their energy use during periods of grid stress.
The report was published by Duke University’s Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability and contends that greater load flexibility by data centers can help interconnect new large loads more quickly while reducing the need for premature investment in additional power plants and transmission lines.
The study introduces a new concept: Curtailment-enabled headroom, which describes how much additional load the grid can absorb using existing capacity with modest, brief usage reductions.
According to the report, the average curtailment time would be two hours, which could facilitate up to 100GW of new large loads on the grid, which is more energy than all data centers use globally. The new loads would be curtailed an average of 0.5 percent of their maximum uptime each year, helping the grid meet peak demand, especially during hot and cold periods.
The report notes that the estimated annual curtailment time is comparable to demand response programs already in place around the US. For years, utilities have encouraged big energy users to curtail their use during demand peaks. So far, however, data centers have largely avoided this, instead maintaining uptime and performance levels to meet customer demand.
However, the study contends that data centers could be ideal demand response participants due to their flexibility. Data centers could trim their power use through a range of measures.
These include temporal flexibility, where computing tasks such as AI model training are rescheduled to accommodate a brief curtailment during times of high demand.
Another measure is spatial flexibility, where data center operators soft their computational tasks to regions not experiencing high levels of demand.
In addition, data center operators can also turn to alternative power to compensate for any curtailment. This could be bolstered by increasing the use of battery storage, much of which has a storage capacity exceeding two hours.
While measures like these won't remove the need for new generation sources, they could significantly reduce the pressure on the US electricity grid and facilitate many more large loads onto the grid.
