title: DERVOS 2025: Big DERs Energy
author: DER Task Force
contenttype: podcast
publication: DER Task Force
published: 2026-01-13T14:00:00
sourceurl: https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/184053325/74816c567cb6b01dbf01df6e20bc36cd.mp3
word_count: 9682
Welcome to another edition of Thunder Now! All right, that was cool. So we have an awesome panel here today to talk about what we, I think, started calling utility-scaleders, but this idea of distributed energy systems that are gigantic, that are, you know, helping large industrial loads, in this case, data centers get up online. I think we're also here to talk about, though, those loads themselves being theirs, which is really interesting. Before we get into it, I want you all to know who we're hanging out here with today. We have an amazing panel. I'll let each person introduce themselves starting here with Halley. Hi, everyone. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Halley Krayo. I sit on a team at Google called the Advanced Energy Team. Our team focuses on emerging energy solutions to support Google's clean energy goals, specifically 24-7 carbon free energy by 2030. We split into two sides. One is focused on data and software solutions, technology partnerships, and the other is focused on advanced technologies, hardware solutions, so I think nuclear, longer energy storage, geothermal. I sit on the data and software solution side, and I've been at Google for six years now. When I started, I was doing energy analytics for 24-7 carbon free energy goals, so measuring, tracking, forecasting, building tools for 24-7 carbon free energy. And just in the past year, I've switched focuses to really focus on this demand side flexibility concept for data centers, so excited to be here today to talk about that and to share more about how Google thinks about it. Wait, data centers can be flexible. I thought they were 100% capacity factor. Interesting. All right. Sean? Hi. I'm Sean Jones. I'm on the Tesla MegaPak team, an IMR market development leader for the data center segment amongst MegaPak. We're seeing a lot of interest in having MegaPak's onsite at data centers, both to help deal with AI power jitter and improved power quality for all of us on the grid, to help enable that flexibility that how I was talking about lower cost and accelerate speed to power. Excited to be here. And I'm told Sean worked on the Memphis XAI project that everyone's very interested and has been interested in seeing the uses for batteries there. Sounds good. Tyler. Hi, everyone. Great to be with you. Thanks for coming out. I'm a fellow at Duke University, also doing a PhD there, have a background in electricity market forecasting, and then develop solar and storage for about five years. And a lot of my research is focused on large generator interconnection and how to accelerate it via flexible interconnection, and then now more focused on large load interconnection. I will have a change in status and a new role in a few weeks will be announcing, but excited to have this conversation. Amazing. Yeah, Tyler's obviously impacted the conversation on data centers quite a bit. Lastly, we have Vick Shao. Vick, tell us about yourself. Hey, guys. Vick Shao, I run a little project development company called DC Grid. We power data centers as well as EV charging sites, completely off grid using local generation, solar, storage, natural gas, and good to be with all of you today. And Vick's being humble. He's a serial entrepreneur in the space who has a pretty high batting average. All right. So I want to start by just stating the key question that I'm trying to answer today. The thing I want to come out of this feeling like I have a better sense of, which is I want to know if there's any way at all to scale the compute, and then therefore the power we need for that compute. To meet the AI bull case in a manner that doesn't include the majority of data centers having DERs or being DERs. That's what I'm interrogating today, and I think we have an amazing group of four people to do that. But just keep that in your minds for the rest of this conversation. That's where this is headed. And I'll come back to it at the end and see what we all think. Let's start with the amount of energy that data centers need. I think in the electricity space, like the non-data center electricity space, there's a skepticism about this load growth actually happening, right? We all sort of grew up in an environment where there really wasn't much of any. We also know like interconnection cues are a bit of a game, so it's some of this fake. There's the general skepticism. So I really want to understand like, do we actually need all this energy? And I'll just kind of state as the moderator. I think we might, right? So I want to see what this group says, but like we have, there's certain dynamics, right? Where you know, training models uses a lot of energy. We have like test time, compute, and scaling laws. And then there's also these use cases, right, where like a chatbot uses this amount of energy. An image generator uses this amount, making a video, this amount, and deep research is even more. And basically like the dynamic ICL together is more energy equals more intelligence. And I think intelligence is pretty valuable, yet none of us really know if Sam Altman, for example, saying he wants 250 gigawatts not too far from now, is realistic or absurd. So Tyler, I wanted to start with you, you're, I think like a really great energy forecaster, you know, before you were doing, you know, your PhD at Duke, you were in like the world of energy consulting, et cetera. What do you think of this? Does this feel real? Everything's moving so fast. So I think it's really hard to have a solid forecast right now. So I'll say though, I'm a little biased because I use this as a research tool. And you know, I've saved thousands of hours just from the standpoint of like Python coding. And I love chainries like more and more chainries and multi-agent systems to just get better and better answers to research questions. I feel like one of the questions though is like, is there going to be a really large market for that type of function? Like do most people want to use AI in that way, which is like really heavy chainries and multi-agent systems? And I'm not really sure because I feel like a lot of the daily tasks that most people use it for may be able to be done in a more local inferencing case and even potentially even locally on your own phone. So I don't know. I think that's one of the big questions is like, how much the more intensive use cases have a large and long-term market? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I do wonder if like there's some world where, you know, every company's like corpus of information is being churned through constantly by these LLMs and so you have these sort of huge, hugely intensive things happening just all the time ubiquitously or, yeah, it's all just happening on the device. I don't know. Hally, you're at Google. What do you think? I think that there is a clear trend upwards. We do anticipate that AI will be a large part of our own growth. And we've also seen that over the years, the digital economy has become a large part of the modern economy and that digital economy has been, the backbone of that has been there in data centers. So we think that it's really important to focus on how do we address the challenge of the day, which is speed to power, speed to capacity in a sustainable and responsible way. So we're thinking about it from that lens, but we do think there will be significant growth. Okay. Anybody else? Any other strong feelings? Well, I'll give you a different perspective. I prior to doing data centers, I spent nine years in energy storage. I spent seven years in EV charging. Just drawing from my experience from the EV charging space, at the time that I saw my last company and moved on to DC Grid. I mean, I had 60-some-odd live construction projects around the country. I was dealing with 20 different utilities. Every single one of them was a three-year wait, at least, to get even a megawatt of a power for an EV charging hub takes three years, pretty much anywhere in the country. So I mean, I think that's, I don't know if that's an answer to your question, but it's certainly a data point that there's definitely low growth. Interesting. I mean, the other thing I feel like is in the conversation on how much energy AI will actually use is there's this sort of thing being dangled out there that maybe we're going to get a big efficiency breakthrough. Maybe the Nvidia chip in six years from now is going to be like 5x more efficient, and the problem basically goes away, right? And I think there's been observations about cloud computing back in the 2010s and power intensity or rather efficiency or effectiveness increased over time. Does anyone have any views on that? Like, do we, are we going to see like huge improvements in efficiency or more kind of incremental? Well, I'll just, I mean, what's been interesting to hear right is that we're now moving towards like megawatt scale racks, and so it should be going more and more dense, it'll become more and more power hungry. One good thing about that is that it's going to open up more space potentially just physically on site of the data center such that if you can fit more batteries, but the density and the power used just seems to be going up. I'll also add, we are seeing trends already in this energy efficiency, these energy efficiency gains as it relates to AI hardware at Google, our seventh generation TPU at this point is around 30 times more efficient than the TPU cloud TPU we launched in 2018. I think Nvidia also shares a couple of their stats around the efficiency gains that they've have with their most recent GPU that they launched Blackwell. So we're seeing that trend, I don't know how far it gets us, but there's definitely uncertainty there, but I do think it's a core part of how we stay competitive also in this industry. Open up big can of worms with this comment because the name of my company is DC Brith, it stands for direct current. So the can of worms is that as all of us know, data centers and computers run on ultimately direct current, EV chargers, the fast charging variety runs on direct current, and here's the rub. I mean, when you have a large battery system or solar system, it ultimately gets converted into AC that gets transmitted over transmission lines, distribution lines, then ultimately gets the destination to serve the loads and another step of conversion in between. So ultimately you end up with an efficiency of, I don't know, best case, 92% Sean would you agree, 92%, 93% in that range? Whereas I think there is, in the rest of it, by the way, that gets lost is in the form of heat. So when you're talking about a data center that's, I don't know, a hundred megawatts just for rough numbers, you're talking about, you know, eight megawatts of heat that's generated that's being wasted, I mean, it's pretty significant and then you have to have built in a big HVAC system to cool it all down again, of course, right? So I think there is going to be a change coming for the industry where you start to power these loads directly using direct current. So I think Nvidia is advocating for 800 volts DC directly into the building and I think that's kind of going to be the path forward and efficiency gains is really one of the big reasons for doing that. So you see efficiency opportunities in kind of the system architecture, the balance of system, all that stuff, I mean, maybe the chips as well, but that's kind of where you're interested. Sean, any last thoughts here? I don't have a ton to add Duncan, I'm not a computer scientist, I'm a power guy, so I don't know, you know, are these forecast true or not? As I reflect on it, you know, the AI is doing incredible things, as Tyler said, it's making us more efficient at our work, it drives my car for me now, which I love. I think maybe it was even Google this week said, like, hey, we made a cancer breakthrough with an AI. And like, I don't want to be from the power sector, I want to make sure we aren't slowing down, you know, reducing road fatalities or solving cancer. And so like in my mindset from the power sector, it's like, how do we accelerate all of these kind of scientific advancements that we can while doing it in a no regrets manner in terms of the infrastructure that we deploy and doing the environmentally sensible way as well? Yeah. I'll just stay on that really. I've, you know, we've already blown through the Turing test, right? It's funny, like, how we just surpass them, there's like no big news. I sort of think the new test is like, can an AI system win a noble prize like in fundamental sciences? Yeah. I think that's like the new bar. And I think that's one of the big questions, like, can it do actual fundamental breakthrough work? Okay. So, yeah, I, maybe I'll just close out this like particular topic with like, I think everyone's already asking, you know, what if, what if this infrastructure build that's a bubble? And I'm, I don't think enough people are asking what if it isn't, right? Because the challenge is enormous. And again, 250 gigawatts by 2033 for one company, I mean, I'm sure there's a little bit of, you know, flexing there, but that's pretty crazy. So let's move on to the sides themselves and how we're going to power them. Everybody now wants one gigawatt data centers. This is wild, right? Like a few years ago, people would talk about 100 megawatts is kind of like the big data center. Now we want these one gigawatt clusters. There's not many examples of one gigawatt point source loads on grids, but they do exist and they're aluminum smelters. There's something like 30 of them on Earth, I don't know, they're better one gigawatt class. There's a handful of these things on Earth, and every single one of them has really kind of like bespoke special setups with their utility, right? Like interesting flexibility agreements where they like ramp down the smelter at certain times, or they have captive power plants, they have pumped hydro, basically like you had to build the power system to accommodate them, not the other way around. And so this notion of we're going to have many, many one gigawatt point source loads way more than 30. They're going to be all over Earth everywhere. I think it's really challenging, and to me it says there's no, there's no like status quo assumption for what's actually going to happen here, right? We're like in very uncharted territory. And so I guess what I'm interested in is how we can actually scale this, right? So I want to kind of go around the room and just hear maybe from your perspective or like your stakeholders perspective, like how are we actually going to, how are we going to accommodate it? Do people actually feel confident that we can like actually accommodate these massive loads on the grid in a manner that looks anything like we've seen before, or is the assumption within all of your organizations the future is very different? I can start. And I want to start by taking a bit of a step back and think about the difference in the state that we're in right now versus the past number of decades where as you mentioned it's been fairly flat. Load growth. We're in a state right now where the primary constraint is power. It's our power supply. And for Google that means we've had to shift our mindset when it comes to data center site selection to think about an energy first mindset. So when we go to, before we sign any contracts before we build anything, when we're thinking about a new site, we are evaluating what the impact will be on that local community on the power system that we'll be operating on. And that has led us to focus on three main lovers. The first one is speed thinking about solutions that can scale and can scale quickly. The second is innovation. So thinking about we do need to bring new solutions to the table, not just on the technology side, but also from the perspective of great design, business models. What can we bring to the table that I can think about things in a new way and help meet this new challenge? And then the third is efficiency. We know that there are sticky points in our system today, slow processes, and how do we use this opportunity to build more for the grid and get rid of some of those barriers so that we can set the grid up for a future investment cycle that is better for everyone. So I know I didn't directly answer a question, but I think it's really important to think about that context and how we're addressing the power needs today and how can we get more out of our existing system and also use this as an opportunity to invest in a under-invested grid to date. Yeah, I imagine in any big org, it's difficult to move on from there was a playbook we used for 10, 15, 20 years to everything is different. Yeah, and specifically also related to our clean energy goals, there's no playbook for how to do 24, 7 current energy at this scale. We'll need to think creatively and bring new solutions to the table. Yeah, any other thoughts here? Do you guys feel like your orgs see the status quo just kind of meeting the moment or is something new coming? I think, especially if you want to connect to the utility system, there's a lot of precedent of one gigawatt power plants, so I think we have good historical context there. The question is how do we do that really fast and in the US we've created this long interconnection process where it could take like seven years to get approval to build a power plant and we're asking how do we move much, much faster and I think that'll be a really important thing for us to look at so that we can enable these loads much quicker. From like candidly Texas, you can build a power plant in one or two years and so like the rest of the country should maybe look at that and say, hmm, is there something there that we should tease out and think about? That's kind of one piece that I think is promising but something to look at. The other thing is you talk about these bigger and bigger point source loads. Power plants kind of have rules of the road of how they operate on the utility system. Loads historically have not and we're seeing that shift a little bit about as loads get to this mega, you know, giga scale. What are the rules of the roads that they should follow so that they can be good actors on the grid? And I think those are like the two things where like if we look at how do we, you know, interconnect power plants and how do we do those processes faster and then how do we make like sensible rules to remove some of these contingency events that we get stuck up on? I think you know, you can really accelerate the on grid build out of data centers. I think that's a really interesting point about, yeah, these huge loads kind of like blur the line between like the system and the user. It's like all the system and it all needs to be dealt with in some manner that actually works. I think it's important to actually conceptualize what a gigawatt looks like. So we're sitting here in New York City. Con Edison has a peak summer load of, I think, well, 12 gigawatts. Con Edison also publishes something called a load duration curve and it's the number of hours in a given year, you know, 8,760 hours in a year. How many gigawatts is in the distribution grid? And the answer is that in a given year, Con Edison spends exactly something like 20 hours at the 12 gigawatts level. It averages about five or six gigawatts, you know, exactly sort of halfway number of hours. So you know, look, I mean, a gigawatt is a fifth of the average load of all five burrows in New York City. We just think about it. I mean, a gigawatt is just ginormous, so it is absolutely ginormous and you were talking about for point dedicated consumption, you have to build very dedicated substations, transmission lines, perhaps high voltage distribution lines. It's highly, highly bespoke dedicated infrastructure for that just at one point load and who pays for it? I mean, is it that data center operator doesn't get shared somehow? He's all big, important issues that we need to just come out and say it like our entire system of like electricity regulation and law, like was not designed for this at all. And really like basic assumptions now are being totally called in the question. Like duty to serve, cost to service. I highly recommend a paper called allocating scarcity that recently came out in the George Washington Law Review by Alexandra Class, University of Michigan and her colleague and they really go down these bedrock assumptions that we've had in the power sector now for over a century and I mean, you look at what's happening in PJM right now. I mean, the entire capacity market might dissolve or, you know, it's this calling this question like we're just going to go back to cost to service. I mean, that's the largest electricity market in the US. So and the other thing is, you know, this is like a classic case of like an unstoppable force meets an unmovable object and the unmovable object in this case is like how we do power system planning. And the fact that like we build everything to your worst case peak under multiple contingency and it's impossible to build out the system fast enough to accommodate this amount of load this quickly if that's the way the plan system. So I mean, I think that's in part what's like driving this push towards the years, of course and on say generation. But I think we're going to have to develop a whole new way of doing power system planning and as we know, like our utilities, in part because of the way they're incentivized, you know, they're not necessarily inclined to go to a different approach. So I mean, I think this also just goes like all these questions around, yeah, cost of service, performance rate, base rate making, you know, getting away from just like, you know, catbacks in son of. It sounds like there's just a whole new power system paradigm that's going to be created in the next like decade. One thing I would add to your original aluminum smelter comparison in the point that you had around each being one off solution to address it or more ad hoc and will that scale. One thing to also acknowledge is that data centers are not a homogenous group. There's a lot of diversity even within data centers in terms of the ML use cases, they'll serve the types of customers, they'll serve their business model and their preferences. And therefore I don't think it's going to be one solution, but I do think we'll need a suite of solutions and the more we can kind of standardize that suite at least as it relates to solving for different use cases, I think the better off will be in terms of scale. Yeah, yeah, it actually has to be like repeatable. I want to talk about on site power a little bit. This notion of like, there's no status quo anymore, I think very much applies to this. But I think if three years ago any of us approached any data center developer and said you're going to need on site power to do this, whether it's all the power, some the power, whatever, they would say I would never do that. That's crazy. What a huge waste of time or reliability or whatever the problem is too expensive. Whereas today, it's certainly not all data centers, but a lot of them are planning for on site power, a lot of them. And I think it illustrates like how quickly expectations are changing. So maybe Sean, I could start with you, like, is that just a bandaid though? Like is it just a hey, the grids not performing well at interconnecting loads, but we're going to solve that. So yeah, there's like a few years where this is going to happen and then we'll get back to normal kind of, or even in a world where we do interconnections well. Is there some like fundamental techno economics that says some of your power, or in certain strange cases, maybe all of your power, like you should make it yourself. I mean, I know you've worked on some of these projects here and also worked on helping make them actually function, which is much harder said than done, or easier said than done. What do you think? Like, can we actually scale that approach and doesn't have a place in the mix here? Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I think the honest answer is the easy button for data centers historically was go to the transmission system, say, hey, I'd like my 100 megawatts, that will be in nine months. Thank you very much. As we've gotten bigger and the system's gotten more congested, that slowed down, so that kind of quality of service in some regions has reduced. And so now it kind of opens up the whole area to competition. So now the electric transmission system is effectively getting competition from the natural gas transmission system, where people are saying, hey, can I go get natural gas? And build a power plant on my site? And is that faster? Is that better quality service? And at the same time, people are exploring, how can I do massive off-grid solar and storage facilities to power my data center as well? And so it's kind of like, I'd say there's more options being reviewed now, and there's more competition that's being looked at, and it's really fascinating. And it's all a game of speed to power, and then long-term probably cost of if you, you know, maybe natural gas is the fastest speed to power. Do I stay on natural gas? That probably depends on that cost. So that's the, I think, my take on that, and it's fascinating to watch that play out and really fun. But maybe on the other side of it, do you find that those perhaps like myself, or like, yeah, we're just going to build all these off-grid, it'll be fine, are perhaps underestimating the challenges that come with actually operating a multi-hundred megawatt off-grid microgrid? I think it's for these insanely volatile loads. Like, tell us a little bit about dealing with, like, a power system like that. Yeah. And I think, you know, in concept, it sounds easy. I'm going to build, you know, a 500-megawatt off-grid power plant or something like that. And, you know, there's a lot of engineering complexity that goes into that. But then you throw the data center in the mix, and particularly in AI training data center. And, you know, those data centers, they can vary, you know, up to 90 percent of their power demand, you know, at, like, really fast frequencies. 10, 20, 30 hertz event, like, has been reported to some people in the industry. And it's kind of like, you know, you gave your child, like, too much candy or chocolate milk and gave them a, the world's most powerful light switch. And they're just going on off, on, off, whenever they want. It really, you know, especially like in the natural gas world, it will break that equipment very rapidly if you don't have a solution. So we've been using our batteries to help smooth that out and give, you know, a steady load profile to those natural gas generators. The other thing that I'd say is fascinating is as these natural gas plants have gotten bigger, not only are they using the batteries to smooth that out, but it's kind of started to embody almost what we see in ISO markets where batteries are performing other services as well. So it's how do I use that battery to provide that spinning reserve, which in the ISO world we call that ancillary service. But that can reduce the fuel burn, you know, by 10 to 30% on site. So like, that's pretty cool. And then it's a capacity resource as well where you can go and look at your ELCC curve or whatever on the utility system. But you can use that battery to manage your thermal de-rate of that onsite generator. And so it's like, basically, you know, by adding batteries to that system, not only can you deal with the AI loads, but you can like, reduce the levelized cost to energy by like 20%. It's pretty cool. It sounds like you're basically just building a utility system at that point, like it's not just like some little microgrid anymore. You need like the full complexity and thoughtfulness of running a utility, maybe not the full, but in that direction. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely, yeah. Vic, what's your experience been like? I know you're doing this as well. I'm going to give you guys a company secret here from my last company. This is what you guys are paying for, by the way. So in my last company, we provided, you know, EV charging solutions to, you know, transit authorities, a lot of fleets and things. And I had to provide temporary power solutions in a lot of the cases, because the utility just couldn't keep up with, with getting power, delivering power to the site. And here's a secret. I mean, we made all of our money on those temporary power projects. And it goes something like this. We think, you know, we're going to get utility power in two years time, or in three years time. So we only need you for that, you know, stopgap measure. And so, you know, financial model, we kind of get the whole temporary system paid for in 18 months. Guess what? I mean, I left my company five years ago. We still have those temporary power solutions on site in many locations even today, five years later. And why is that? I mean, well, a lot of the times the utilities just take longer, they just do. They give away a distribution transformer to somebody else instead of, to the site that they had promised us that they were going to deliver it to, you know, shit happens. And anyway, you know, we continue to provide power to those chargers on a temporary basis. And the customers paying, you know, in many cases, through the nose. But hey, they still need it, because otherwise they will be, their buses won't run. So I think the same thing will happen here in data center space, honestly. That was just going to say. I mean, one thing that's remarkable, right, is like the U.S. natural gas combined cycle fleet, right, operates at like less than 60% capacity factor. So like, there's so much energy in the system. And yeah, we're going to go and sort of build fully redundant, like by the meter power systems, which is great business opportunity, by the way, but like, there is a fundamental like resource and efficiency there. And partly, it's a result of what we were just talking about earlier, just like this a movable force kind of meeting this, an unsolvable force meeting, a move object. So I think this is going to like have to push towards different planning practices and interconnection practices. But I think there are, there are at least two questions of my mind, I know this. One is, most of this is going to be a sort of bridge power solution, such that it sort of goes away or is only used for a small number of hours in the air for on peak purposes. Once the grid connection is complete, I think the second is like, our battery is going to compete against thermal on-site options. And I think that's like one of the big questions, right, I was just talking with some Wall Street guys two days ago, and they're like super excited about reciprocating engines. You know, they're all these new market entrants now supplying them, and they're achieving efficiencies, they didn't think they could. And we haven't heard a lot of like battery storage deals announced, I know they're coming. I could like, we've heard like, you know, Iron Mountain Data Center says they're like two hour battery, they're putting in the front of the meter on the New Jersey Center, they're doing one of Virginia, they're other deals happening, it just like hasn't yet achieved full scale. So I think this is like going to call the question, like in batteries really compete in this kind of service option, or like, is thermal going to be the primary power service? Yeah, and I'll add from Google's perspective, our strong preference is to look at solutions that for a data center that is going to be good connected, let's look at solutions that are going to be grid connected as well, front of the meter. And a big reason for that is reliability, thinking about cost effectiveness, and then also business flexibility in the longer term. If we are seeing these types of solutions as a bridge, our preference at this point in time is, how do we use, I'll segue for you, flexibility to be that bridge potentially instead of some of the behind the meter or on site naturally as. Yeah, okay, interesting. I think it's, yeah, it's a good time to transition to more like grid tied flexibility type stuff. Why don't we just kick it off with you Tyler? And it is the, is flexibility happening, right? Is the flexibility for faster interconnection thing happening, obviously nothing happens in a day in our space, but is there, is there momentum? Yeah, I mean, what's been mind blowing, it's been revealed over the past eight months, is that like, we don't have quasi-ferm or non-ferm transmissions service options for loads that want them, and that's been revealed in the PGM co-location docket and all around the country. And so, I mean, that's why like, to the great credit of South was powerful, like super innovative team there by the way. If we could just clone them and like put them in every other transmission provider, maybe we'd have a chance at this, but you know, they're moving forward with a non-ferm transmission service here they call chills and they also have their co-located or electrically proximate. Wait, what do they call it? Chills, it stands for conditional high impact large load service. That's chill. Yeah, it is, it's pretty based. Yeah, and they have Hilga, which is like for electrically proximate, you know, co-located loads and gents. So I think like, at minimum, we should provide these options everywhere. I mean, right now because of just like the total cluster that is PGM, it seems like something it's going to move in that direction. But as you know, like, I mean, the notion that in a year you'd like, get any new service tiers on the bulk power system is like crazy, it usually would be like a five year cycle and you'd have like multiple years of stakeholder process and like a two year long, you know, regulatory talking for the FERC, but it is moving. I just think the question, one of the questions is like, is it just going to be this like bridge power solution with thermal options or can we get some more innovative practices there with battery storage and, you know, some compute flex and Google I think has been a real leader and trying to offer that as a service. There's also a lot to come, like, we're going to learn a ton, I think, from Various. I mean, they are, as you all know, like many veterans of the hyperscalers, they are committed to four hour lithium ion battery storage, they'll be announcing ground breaking in the next few months, at least one or two, targeted service for 2027. And I think that's going to be like a key sort of test as to whether we can see some different options here. And I totally agree with Tyler, the chills, which will get used on the hottest days of the year, great progress there, you know, Dominion has their cap flex program, really similar kind of concept, where hey, and data center alley, if you can be flexible for two hours at the time, about 50 days the year, I'll give you more power today. And then PG&E has a similar program called Flex Connect that we've used for a lot of our EV chargers, so they don't get stuck in off grid mode, like Vic was talking about. And it's all about how do you bring a little bit of flexibility to the system, and it's usually between two and four hours in summer afternoons. And so you know, Tyler was saying, can batteries do that, or do I need thermal generation? Like a battery today, you can get roughly 12 hours of battery for the same cost as like the natural gas generators you're seeing today, because natural gas turbines have gotten so expensive and battery costs have just come down a lot. So I think there's a lot of opportunity with batteries. I would say, and hopefully there's some regulators in the room, be thoughtful about how you structure these flexible connection programs, so that, you know, all these kind of various technologies can be considered. A lot of them today, they say, hey, you can sign up for this and I'll give you power, but no guarantee I'll ever give you power. And you know, in practicality, they're in the business of selling power, so like they don't want to never give you power, but that's how the contract reads and to underwrite that, technically, you know, it really kind of limits your solution set there. So that would be my, you know, feedback to kind of the regulatory audience for these programs is let's develop them. And then let's think about, you know, what is the reasonable boxing in of the problem statement that I need to help accelerate all these things? I want to, I want to tell you a palliative talk, because you just, um, at least a really important study on this topic and put out some position statements. Yeah, I'll first talk about over the summer, Google announced two new contracts that incorporate, uh, demand response and flexibility. And as mentioned, the primary driver of those is speed to power. It's not an economic signal that we're responding to, uh, and what are challenges that we've come across is that a lot of the incentives often aren't aligned when it comes to DR programs. And what I mean by that is, um, it is very expensive to disrupt workloads. Each workload is going to have, even if it's an ML workload, it might have different varying levels of flexibility. Uh, I don't think flexibility will ever be a solution that can be held across all workloads, so it can't be something that's mandatory and we can't ramp down 100%. But we can provide some flexibility. It just needs to be aligned with also the data center long-term planning process. And in order to be aligned with that planning process both on the utility side and the data center side, there needs to be, I think what Tyler called quasi-firm service. So better understanding the bounds of what that flexibility entails. It can't be uncapped, um, it can't be called on frequently. But can we create something that is called on infrequently and emergency situations that has a bounded number of hours per year that also solves for system resource adequacy needs? And the research that Tyler was referring to that, uh, Google sponsored that E3 led in SPP found that with an average, I think, of 10 hours per year, you can achieve effective load carrying capability or ELCC values on par with thermal resources, uh, both in the winter and the summer. Where the winter season is, is the longer peak, so you might need a longer duration. I think we studied 10 hours and then the summer peak is more that four or six hour needs. So I mentioned that to say that DR Ken and should be part of longer-term planning processes, but we also need to work on aligning incentives to support those programs. And like I said, because data centers are diverse, that might need to look different for different data centers or different types of DERs even. There's also the offsite flexibility option that we want to, uh, pursue and develop as well. And we can talk more about that. But, uh, it needs to be incorporated in longer-term planning. It needs to be something that has some bounds in order to enable businesses to be able to plan around it and assess the risk on their end as well. You just want to make sure we heard that 10 hours on average a year of flex, giving ELCC at the level of thermal resources. Like, that is mind-blowing. I mean, you know, it's one study at SPP, like they're caveats, but that is mind-blowing. And it's like, it just shows, like, how inefficient the planning process has been that, like, we're not accounting for that yet. And you sort of ask, why is that the case? Like, why don't we have quasi-foam service tiers? I mean, go read Constellation's comments in the PGM co-location docket. I mean, what they basically say is, like, the reason we don't have this is because the load-surning entities do not want it because it fundamentally challenges their core business model. So, last thing I'll say, we need better language, like, firm versus non-fer. I don't quasi-firm. This sounds kind of silly. My own terminology, but the thing is, like, firm is not firm. Firm is one in 10 planning. You're planning for an one-outage in 10 years, but it's actually worse than that. That's just the resource adequacy outages, let alone, like, the other source of outages. So, like, it's a spectrum, right, of firmness or non-firmness or flexibility. And we need better language if people have proposals, maybe we can come up with something. I guess I feel like what I'm observing is that there's, like, the end to the system engineer, it makes perfect sense that flexibility in the interconnection process, like, clearly should be a part of it. To your point, we have, like, all these unutilized plants that we could just increase output from and then just make sure we deal with those 10 hours. That sort of thing. Yet, it has to work its way through all of these institutions and everybody has, you know, stakeholder processes, which always means, you know, it's going to be complicated. And so, you have, like, a certain type of developers out there who are just saying, I don't want to deal with any of that. Let's go right now. And there is a race. We're witnessing an AI race unfold. That kind of feels like the tension between these two solutions. I like both of them, by the way. But so, I'm curious, though, when it comes to flexibility, it sounded like, Holly, you were saying, like, there's some amount of load that can be scheduled. And then, while difficult, like, there's certain things that can even be interrupted. But then there's some amount that cannot either. Like, do we think batteries are, in a world where flexibility for interconnection becomes very prominent? Do we think batteries are going to do most of this job? It's like, what I wonder. And, like, there's, for this value, but then all these data centers have UPSs anyway. All these data centers need to, like, black start, backup generators anyway. These loads are really crazy. And, you know, even if you're connected to the grid, the utility's not happy about, like, sub-cycle load fluctuations, it kind of just feels like the end game is batteries everywhere. Like, at any power market that batteries are being developed anyway, you should put them at the data centers that are being developed. Is this, Holly, Sean, both of you? Like, this feels like a layup to me. Like, this has got to be what's going to happen, right? Oh, caveat first, that the announcements that we made were very specific to our IT load dropping. So, it wasn't incorporating anything. We weren't transferring load to diesel. We weren't transferring load to backup generation through batteries. We were looking at our IT workloads and what are the service level objectives or the reliability requirements of those IT workloads. And during these periods, again, planning for something that is very infrequent and is bounded, how do we either reroute, reschedule, or throttle those workloads, so touch that we can drop load. So, in the use cases that we've seen today, that has been what we focused on. Batteries, I think, will also be part of the solution, but it hasn't been parted so far of what we've announced. Yeah, Sean, your salesman, giving me something here. Yeah. Well, I think for, you know, the IT loads, the equipment is phenomenally expensive if we put in power terms. It's roughly 50 billion a gigawatt for those Nvidia chips. And they have a four or five-year lifetime. And so, if you run the math, they depreciate at something like two bucks a kilowatt hour. Whoa. That's like above the LMP cap. That's insanely expensive electricity. And so, interrupting those more than 10 hours a year is how I said it's like, you know, the dollars really take up very rapidly. And it starts to say, okay, I don't want to interrupt my money-making equipment because A, just the depreciation's insane and B, it's annoying. I want to go and transition it to something like an on-site resource like a battery. And we think there's a lot of potential there because, you know, battery is kind of don't think about it. It's just there and it can do it. And then the battery when it's not doing that kind of flexible load connection thing can do so many other services for you. You know, meet the voltage-ride through requirements, move the AI loads around so they're flat. You know, it helps save you money on your power bill, too, or help with the 24-7 grandergy goals. So, that's kind of our pitch and our view on it is a few hours the year maybe folks will want to turn off their servers. But probably won't. And then what do you think may hours a year? It's like, okay, you definitely want to do it on a battery. Like most of this, you think, comes from batteries. I mean, I think you could do batteries, you could do your on-site thermal generation. Like, we should take a technology-agnostic approach and look at all the options. I think from an error permitting and environmental goals and things like that perspective, I imagine a lot of the players will look at batteries for a wide variety of reasons. I mean, part of this goes to, you know, the notion of the five nines, uptime requirement, and what type of extreme event you want to be able to ride through. So, if you're trying to plan for, you know, a 48 hour outage, it's hard to do that with batteries, obviously. And, I mean, just to underscore how crazy it, so these are transmission-connected loads. And you have anything more than a 12 hour outage. I mean, these are, this is like a blackout event on the scale of like the largest blackouts that have ever occurred in US history that like led to the entire formation of NERC, right? These are like, ultra, ultra low probability events. But like, of course, if you're trying to plan for the absolute worst case scenario always, it's like, it's hard to have it not lead you to a thermal solution. And I think one of the big questions in front of us is like, is the five nines uptime requirement going to basically just like hurdle us into this like deeper thermal commitment? Or like, is there going to be a little bit of flexibility there in an evolution in the SLA and SLO structure that enable battery storage and other solutions to emerge? And again, I think, you know, various is trying to figure that out. You know, it may still be, right? You put in the diesel. But the thing is, I mean, one of the big, by the way, is a great series of paper that Janet Rock is putting out on diesel. And obviously, they have a business interest to go after diesel. But there are a lot of good points in there, right? Like, it's actually quite dangerous arguably to store more than like 12 hours or maybe 20 hours of onsite diesel for like a multi-hundred megawatt load. So I don't even know the like, and by the way, if you're in a level of a blackout of what we just talked about, like the notion that they're going to send the diesel to like all the data centers instead of the hospitals and other critical loads, I just think it's like, yeah, doesn't make sense. By diesel fuel suppliers in Northern Virginia, I think that's a good idea. You're making a case for efficiency, right? Which all of us in the room, I think, would agree, that's the same thing to do. But it's really not how utilities are incentivized, is it? I mean, they're incentivized by deploying more stuff and making a rate case, making a rate base return on that. So efficiency actually is not what the utilities want. So I think there's a bit of a problem. There's a skeptical of the driver behind this. We could dive into that, we have four minutes left. I want to think about the future, right? Let's think about like, terawatt scale compute. I'm not saying one site, but in aggregate, right? Really the top of the AI bull case, right? Where 15 years from now, there's a billion AI souls that help our lives, right? This sort of thing, right? And I've had the privilege to kind of sit and design reviews of some data centers now, not on the energy production side, but the data center itself. And these are extraordinarily complex sites. From utility transformer down to the rack, from a power distribution perspective, it's like a high art, right? There's like thousands of switches, hundreds of transformers, switchboards, it's like an immense amount of complexity to basically get electrical power into GPUs or TPUs or whatever. And I kind of want to just like ideate with you guys a little bit. If we're going to get to terawatt scale stuff, that just seems like we're just going to hit so many bottlenecks along the way. There's not going to be enough switchboards, transformers, et cetera. And we're also simultaneously seeing kind of like the data center evolve into the quote AI factory. And some of this is like lingo and branding. But like there is some like difference here. Like Vic was talking about, we have like 800 volt DC architectures. I'm just curious, like does anyone see any kind of radical simplification around the corner? So this can actually become like gigantic, right? Because it's just hard for me to see Sam Altman getting 250 gigawatts by 2033 when there's like six engineering firms that know how to make a data center, right? Like they're so complicated. Vic, I'd like to start with you. Like is there a radically simpler path that is like actually massively scalable that maybe in some amount of time, that's actually how data centers will look? Well, you clear maybe. But I don't think that's that simple way in and of itself. Look, I mean, again, I'm going to give you a very biased answer. So the recurrent, I fundamentally believe is the way to go to power all this stuff. You don't need to sink. There are no phases that you have to sink. You know, it's very robust and resilient. The voltage and the power converters that exist. So it's just, I think that's ultimately where it's part of the solution. It's certainly not the entire solution. I mean, and we just, right, we just saw, we'll see if this takes off, but like Heron Power just released there. Their DC product for data centers, Drew will be on another panel today. So maybe he could talk about that briefly. But in theory, this thing, you know, replaces the transformer, the switch gear, the protections, and just sends 800 volt DC through the building all the way down to the racks. This feels just like example of the sort of thing we need to, like, actually scale this to massive levels. I don't know, Sean, if you have any views here on what's coming around the corner. On the 800 volt DC thing, I'm going to be honest. I don't know. I think if you're a college PhD in electrical engineering, you should go and work on DC protection, it sounds like. And DC, I mean, you know, direct current, not data center. That's always been a really tricky subject. And that's one of the main challenges of it. Yeah, I mean, I think the radical simplifications or the radical accelerances, you know, Tyler's done great studies on how do we be flexible? And it's just continuing to think about how we partner in the energy system to help accelerate our projects and get the, you know, fantastic AI work to accelerate our science moving would be my. Yeah, I will. I'm not an expert to answer that question. I'm not informed enough, but I'll put a plug in for that last point around if data centers themselves can't be flexible. One other business model work exploring is how do we partner with offsite DERs to build capacity on the system who customers that might have a lower value of loss load, for example, that can dispatch more frequently and use that as a tool in the toolkit to address flexibility if it's not onsite at data centers. Bringing your own grid capacity, whether DRs, etc. Yeah, very cool. Maybe we just put these things in space at some point. That seems possible as well. Okay, so if we remember the question in the beginning, can we scale compute to meet the AI bulk case and the energy required without most data centers either having DERs or being DERs? I want to just go around the room and hear from everybody. Allie, what do you think? I think it'll be very hard without that. Okay. No, that sounds like a yes. My gut is it's probably most efficient for them to have some level of DER integration on site and really partner with that energy system to make it most cost effective and efficient. Yeah, I mean, it seems inevitable. They're likely to have some form of on-site capacity. And I think the big question is like, is that going to be primarily thermal or can batteries and other options sort of compete and a lot of open questions there? But also, how much of an needs to be on site versus distributed elsewhere on the system and can you create a market for flexibility? And to be clear in my question, I'm saying like, yeah, a flexible data center. I'm calling that a DER. Basically, it is a DER on the system. Vic, what do you think? It's essential. I mean, let's face it, we're not building enough transmission and distribution lines. And we won't disappear. It makes like a stupid question, of course. All right, well, that's all we got. Thanks, thanks you guys. This was really fun. Let's take a selfie, yeah?