The data center boom has an upside: innovation for the US grid

The AI boom has led to a gargantuan surge in energy demand across the country. Critics say this upswell in connections is enacting a stress test on America’s aging grid infrastructure. Worries abound that, in the short term, the energy crunch could lead to surging electrical bills and, in the long term, may eventually lead to outages or other technical problems.

At TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, industry insiders tempered much of this criticism with optimism about how the flood of new energy connections could actually be opening the door for grid modernization. Apoorv Bhargava, founder and CEO of WeaveGrid, Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, and Kristin Eberhard, VP of policy at Rewiring America, said that though the grid faces new challenges, there are also plenty of new opportunities as well.

“It’s a very different electric grid, right?” said Bhargava. “We’re dealing with a ton of new variables, including renewable energy. We’re dealing with a ton of new load in the form of electric vehicles and data centers and heat pumps, and the ability to manage and orchestrate is fundamentally what utilities are now grappling with.”

While all of those new connections are driving an ever larger amount of stress to the grid, Bhargava’s company hopes to provide the kind of load orchestration and management that helps utilities maximize the potential of the current system. WeaveGrid’s software can help organizations efficiently deploy energy while also optimizing connections to reduce utility payers’ bills, the founder said.

“The scale of the investment in AI infrastructure is driving a tremendous amount of innovation,” said Heidel. “There’s a ton of new technologies that are coming off the shelves and starting to get to scale that, pulled together, can actually really make sure that data centers are the best community neighbors and citizens they can possibly be.”

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