For data center development, the binding constraint has moved from chips to grid access, and getting connected now involves three decisions rather than one. How do you connect, given that faster grid access increasingly comes with strings attached? Which distributed energy resources do you build behind that connection? And once it is built, how do you actually manage load flexibility and behind-the-meter assets in a live market?
GridBeyond will start with a short primer on how flexible and interruptible interconnection regimes are taking shape across the major U.S. markets, and what accepting one commits a project to in practice. Once a curtailment obligation is fixed, the commercial question becomes a sizing question: What is the lowest-cost portfolio that still meets your reliability standard?
GridBeyond will then walk through how it answers that question quantitatively. Drawing on a recent client study of a co-located wind, solar, and storage cluster supplying a data center, the team will show how GridBeyond simulated 25+ configurations hour by hour across a 25-year horizon, varying interconnection import and export limits, battery duration, and the phasing of renewable buildout. Two different questions were put to the same model: What the storage is worth in the wholesale market, and how much continuous data center load can the portfolio carry?
The session closes on what happens after the portfolio is built. Curtailment obligations are increasingly written into interconnection agreements, and meeting them reliably now functions as a condition of operating. GridBeyond will go into detail on its around-the-meter optimization approach, which orchestrates the full set of assets sitting around a data center — batteries, generators, and renewables — from a single platform. The team will cover why single-asset approaches fall short, and why uncoordinated resources cannot respond as one to a utility signal. Between events, the same infrastructure earns from energy markets, ancillary services, and demand response.
Join GridBeyond’s Alden Phinney and Ben Sigrin for a practical, numbers-first look at how data center power gets planned, built, and operated. Attendees will leave with a clearer sense of which questions to put to their own projects, and how to test the answers before committing capital.
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