The Ledger
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Norris: 0.5% data center curtailment unlocks 98 gigawatts of capacity
“At 0.5% flexibility or curtailment of the new data center load, you could add up to 98 gigawatts of new data centers across the U.S. And at 0.25% curtailment of the new load, you could add 76 gigawatts.”
Norris: Roughly half of all US generation and transmission is unused
“And so what that basically means is that in any given hour,
On average, approximately half of all generation and transmission infrastructure is unused on average in the U.S., and it's actually worse than that because you're not counting for all the reserve ma…”
Norris: Data center curtailment requires only partial load reduction in most hours
“When we ran the numbers, so like at that, that 0.25% load curtailment rate on average, we found that the number of hours in which Curtailment would be required. Some amount of curtailment would be 85 hours, but in 73 of those 85 hours, at least 50% of the new …”
Norris: Data centers are not constant 24/7 flat electrical loads
“I don't know where this idea came from of 24 seven. They are not 24 seven loads, and it's critical to clarify this. So the servers may be 24 seven, right, the chips themselves, but there's an enormous amount of cooling infrastructure and other infrastructure a…”
Norris: Duke Energy mandates demand response for new 100-megawatt loads
“Duke Energy said at a public event that they are now going to require all new hyperscale loads above a hundred megawatts that participate in demand response.”
Norris: ERCOT connects energy projects 2.5 times faster than PJM
“The overall peak load in PJM is approximately two times that in ERCOT, and yet PJM's interconnection rate overall for all resources over the past two years has been approximately 2.5 times less than ERCOT.”
Norris: ERCOT decouples grid upgrades from interconnection to speed up projects
“The defining feature of ERCOT's interconnection process is that they don't rely on the interconnection process itself to identify and pay for grid upgrades. And this enables them to interconnect projects much more quickly and at much lower cost.”
Norris: State Regulators and Utilities Will Oppose DOE Interconnection Jurisdiction Expansion
“There's this jurisdictional question, and on that one, I think there's obviously going to be a variety of perspectives, and there will be concerns on the part of, especially of some state commissioners, officials, and certainly the investor-owned utilities.”
Norris: Most grid stress events fall in the two- to six-hour range
“I think there it's widely recognized that in the vast majority of events that you're talking about that, you know, the two to kind of six hour range is sort of the sweet spot when you just kind of look at, you know, most of these periods of system stress.”
Norris: Data centers will pair batteries with diesel backup generators going forward
“My sense is that all those two-hour battery storage deals that we just mentioned at data centers, they still have gensets, likely diesel for those longer duration emergency events, and they're not at all mutually exclusive, and in fact, it may be that predomin…”
Norris: ERCOT gets generation online faster by waiving upfront deliverability
“And, right, that's exactly what ERCOT does, right, for generation. They don't require upfront deliverability, and it allows them to get generation online much more quickly and at much higher rates.”
Norris: US interconnection queue grew 40% in 2022 to over 2,000 GW
“So, in twenty-twenty-two alone, the backlog of projects in interconnection queues waiting to connect to the grid Grew by 40%. It brought the total to just over 2000 gigawatts. 80% of this growth, growth was driven by solar and storage projects, and for compari…”
Norris: US power project interconnection time has doubled to four-plus years
“And at the same time, we've seen, and this has been documented by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the time required to interconnect has approximately doubled from around 15 years ago. So it used to be that the typical duration from interconnection requests to …”
Norris: UK Curtailable Connections Program Compensates Customers for Excess Curtailment
“The UK has this whole curtailable connections program, and they actually remarkably, if they end up curtailing either the generator to the load more than what their sort of guarantee says, that they actually compensate the customer.”
Norris: Most demand response loads were initially planned as firm loads
“The vast majority of the loads that participate in demand response, they were planned as firm loads, right? So when the transmission provider ran their interconnection study, and the transmission plan for that jurisdiction, and then the reserve margin planning…”
Norris: ERCOT, PG&E, and SCE offer programs trading flexibility for interconnection
“ERCOT has this controllable load service, which does make that sort of trade-off explicit. PG&E is doing it with their new FlexConnect program, primarily at distribution scale for EV chargers, but the hope is to expand it. Southern California Edison has a simi…”
Norris: Crypto mining operations can drop power to zero within minutes
“The computational loads that are most flexible are, you know, the crypto mining operations. And they're now, you know, some of the most flexible loads On the entire power system, and they can go from, you know, like max draw to zero and, you know, one minute o…”
Norris: Texas has 40 GW of wind capacity, nearly 30% of US total
“Texas has around 40 gigawatts of installed wind. It's three times more than any other state, so Iowa is the next at about 12 and a half gigs. This is just under 30% of all U.S. Wind power capacity.”
Norris: Texas reached 17 GW of utility-scale solar, rivaling California
“ERCOT is now at about 17 gigawatts of utility scale solar installed. The state at large at around 20 gigawatts of all solar. So it's now number two in the U.S. Just behind California. And the utility scale side now appears effectively equivalent with Californi…”