Load growth from data centers requires urgent investment in efficiency and demand flexibility.
Data centers house the servers, storage, and communications equipment that power the Internet and other digital services on which modern life depends. A new technology, generative artificial intelligence (AI), is particularly power-intensive and has been the driver of new data center growth. Some planned AI data center campuses require 10-100 times more power than is typical for data centers today.
These drastic increases in electric demand to power computing equipment and associated cooling will impact the electric grid, emissions, water, and health. These impacts are large on a national scale, but particularly acute in communities and regions hosting these new data centers.
ACEEE is working to reduce the impact at the data center site through policies that incentivize or require better building design, equipment, and cooling performance, along with data reporting to assess the data center’s efficiency performance. But a currently untapped and potentially greater opportunity exists outside the data center. By investing in the efficiency and demand flexibility of existing buildings and industry, data center developers and the utilities that serve them can reduce peak electric loads and free up electric capacity.
This investment in efficiency would directly reduce energy bills for those most affected. Also, by better utilizing existing grid resources and avoiding the construction of new generation and transmission, this data-center-led investment would reduce costs and emissions for all electric users. Best of all, investments in energy efficiency are faster and cheaper than constructing new generation, with the associated backlogs and interconnection queues.
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