Oregon utility tries out a faster, cheaper way to power data centers

Narayan is familiar with complex computing challenges. He founded, built, and sold a semiconductor design company called Berkeley Design Automation in the 2000s. Next, he launched Autogrid, a ​“virtual power plant” software provider that was sold to Schneider Electric, the French energy equipment and services giant, in 2022 and is now part of utility software company Uplight.

Gridcare applies similar computing techniques to model the interactions of lots of power-hungry customers across a dynamic, networked grid, he said.

“You have a major combinatorial-explosion issue here,” Narayan said. ​“Instead of analyzing one case and one dispatch scenario, which planning teams do — and which is itself very complicated — you have to analyze 200,000-plus scenarios and contingencies.”

Under traditional grid-modeling methods, ​“that’s typically done in a sequential way, one project and one scenario at a time,” he said. But that’s a highly impractical approach to finding solutions quickly enough to inform utility decision-making.

As Narayan noted, ​“We have to look at many different projects, each with its impact on ramp and load, over the next five to 10 years. We have to look at very many different scenarios of flexibility. And we have to do it for every hour of the year.”

Recent developments in AI and computing power have made this complex problem solvable: ​“We’re able to take all the sources of flexibility that may exist, and then examine all the combinations and permutations that exist, and find the lowest-cost way to manage those constraints.”

With that expertise to back up Gridcare’s revelation of the options at hand, PGE has been able to approach data centers in the Hillsboro area to propose mutually beneficial commitments, he said.

“Those data centers that are willing to work with us, if they’re willing to be flexible, we’ll put them at the top of the queue” for additional power, Bekkedahl said. ​“For someone who says, ​‘Nope, we’re going to want 100 percent,’ well then, we say, ​‘You’ll wait for us to build the transmission.’”

At least one data center has already pulled the trigger on a project identified by the collaboration between Gridcare and PGE. Last month, Aligned Data Centers announced plans to work with energy-storage specialist Calibrant Energy to deploy a 31-megawatt/62-megawatt-hour battery across the street from its Hillsboro data center. It’s the first publicly revealed project that’s part of the scope of work enabling the 80 megawatts of additional capacity that PGE will be able to energize next year.

Once it’s turned on sometime next year, that battery will allow Aligned to expand its computing capacity at the data center years faster than it would have been able to by waiting for PGE to upgrade its grid to supply its peak power demand. Aligned didn’t disclose how many megawatts of increased power demand its expansion will cause, a sign of the highly competitive nature of today’s data center market.

Accelerating that ​“speed to power” has become an overweening obsession of data center operators seeking to meet tech giants’ AI ambitions, and flexibility is increasingly pointed to as the way forward.

A February report from a Duke University team led by researcher Tyler Norris found that the U.S. has nearly 100 gigawatts of existing capacity for data centers that can curtail less than half of their total power use during peak demand events, which occur about 100 hours of the year. Last month, Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to fast-track a rulemaking process to prioritize such flexible interconnections on U.S. transmission grids.

But data centers can’t afford to invest in batteries like this without clear commitments from utilities that those investments will in fact resolve the grid constraints preventing them from getting online faster.

“This is where PGE was a fantastic partner with us,” said Michael Welch, Aligned’s CTO. ​“They were able to model these scenarios and understand them with a high degree of accuracy, and provide the greatest impact without wasting capacity. As that came into clarity for us, we were able to work within those constraints.”

Bekkedahl emphasized that PGE is taking its time in its work with Gridcare. While the utility hopes to interconnect 400 megawatts of expanded data center load in Hillsboro by 2029, ​“we’re not putting on 400 megawatts tomorrow,” he said. ​“There’s a stepping-stone process here. We want to see it in action before we believe it.”

Nor can PGE completely avoid building more transmission and generation to meet its fast-growing demand for power. ​“We’re going to have to build out. This is just a bridging strategy,” he said.

But any approach that can increase the amount of electricity that PGE sells without adding exorbitant grid costs should help reduce the impact on customers at large, Bekkedahl said. ​“Bringing down the peak, and bringing up the overall utilization of the system, makes it more affordable for all customers.”