Dive Brief:
- Portland General Electric has freed up more than 80 MW for data center interconnections next year using a new, artificial intelligence-enabled flexibility tool, the utility said Oct. 8.
- PGE partnered with the California-based startup GridCARE, which uses AI, detailed hourly demand modeling and optimized flexible resources like batteries and onsite generators to find spare capacity. The added flexibility allows PGE “to interconnect multiple data center customers years earlier than initially expected,” the companies said.
- “We are taking tools that have been in use for many years, that are well understood and well utilized … and moving them into the [grid] planning space,” GridCARE CEO Amit Narayan said in an interview. “In doing that, we realized we could open up quite a bit of capacity.”
Dive Insight:
PGE’s territory includes the Portland suburb of Hillsboro, long a global hub for chipmaker Intel. More recently, Hillsboro developed into a major data center hub thanks to its position at the mouth of an undersea fiber highway connecting North America and Asia, said Larry Bekkedahl, PGE’s senior vice president of strategy and advanced energy delivery.
Bekkedahl said Hillsboro alone has 800 MW of data center capacity operating today on a grid with a total system load of about 4.5 GW. PGE has around 3 GW of active data center load requests, more than 400 MW of which could energize by 2029, he added.
Bekkedahl said data centers eager to hook up to the transmission-constrained Pacific Northwest grid are coming to the realization that more onsite or nodal flexibility can speed up the process. That’s a big change from just a few years ago, when data centers presented as flat, round-the-clock loads that could push the system to its limits during the five or 10 days each year when demand peaks…