The microgrid’s primary arena — resiliency — is expanding as developers capitalize on the unique and massive power needs of data centers.
Enchanted Rock, which offers “resilience-as-a-service,” is betting that both utility reticence about new connection models and concerns over data center loads can be quelled with the promise of guaranteed dispatch capabilities. And they’re using natural gas, at least in part, to do that.
- The top line: So-called “bridge-to-grid” microgrids use a mix of generation types, including the company’s “proprietary” natural gas technology, to fully power a data center while it awaits interconnection to the grid. But once they’re online, Enchanted Rock can help a utility to fully control those systems, providing guaranteed peaking capacity for the lifetime of the data center — and, at least in theory, avoiding the need for larger upstream infrastructure build-outs.
- The market grounding: Data centers are expected to bring terawatts of new load onto the grid in coming decades, as the AI race brings huge demand for energy, and huge new emissions with it. But flexible load may offer a glimmer of hope; according to Bloomberg NEF, any chance of hitting net zero by 2050 will require that around a third of all load be flexible.
- The current take: The company’s COO Allan Schurr told Latitude Media that the flexibility that Enchanted Rock’s new microgrid approach offers to the grid isn’t the same as traditional demand response, which can’t give absolute certainty. “If you’re going to avoid transmission reinforcement ten miles away, you need the hard switch off,” Schurr said. “The transmission engineers are not going to take best efforts; they need to be absolutely certain that the load will come off, not most of the time or almost all the time, but every single time.”
According to Schurr, today’s data centers have three choices when it comes to the power shortfall they’re facing: wait, relocate, or build their own supply.
“They don’t like to wait,” he said. And “they sometimes already bought the land so moving to another market is not an easy thing to do….And so the bridge power idea is really the one that allows them to be in the market they want to be in the timeline they want to pursue.”
Microgrids have generally offered data centers the security of backup power. But in the bridge-to-grid scenario, data centers are essentially bringing their own peaking capacity.
Flexible interconnection is still an “emerging capability,” Schurr admitted, and selling utilities on the reliability of distributed assets is generally challenging. But, he added, bridge-to-grid’s hard stop capabilities adds a new element to conversations between utilities and data center developers.
Though microgrids in many cases are already responsive to the grid and can interact with price signals, creating a dispatchable resource that a utility would recognize is a level-up.
“We work with utilities where they have visibility into the availability of those resources, and they call those dispatch calls to our control room, and we are operating on their behalf,” Schurr said.
Enchanted Rock’s deals with utilities are in many cases structured like traditional power purchase agreements with wholesale generators, he added; most distributed resource programs can’t achieve that level of certainty.
The skeptical take
Enchanted Rock is billing bridge-to-grid as something of a permanent solution for data center load growth; the product is designed to support a data center (and the grid) for its entire operational lifetime.
Plus, the setup essentially renders predictions about load growth numbers “irrelevant,” Schurr said, “because the load brings the resource at the same time, so there isn’t the risk of being too far out in front or falling behind.”
That said, introducing natural gas as a solution to companies intent on decarbonization can be tricky.
For a data center, Schurr argued, adding those additional emissions in to meet the 500-some hours a year of peak needs is preferable to building costly combined-cycle gas turbines that would run for closer to 5,000 hours a year.
For companies like Microsoft, which has pledged to become net zero by 2030, new gas poses something of a problem. But according to Schurr, those companies, as desperate as they are to get their hands on new computing capacity, will “thread the needle” by doubling down on renewable PPAs in data center regions.
Schurr declined to share exact numbers, but said Enchanted Rock’s pipeline for this data center solution is “substantial.”
Microgrids used to be a “backup plan” for data centers, he added. But in light of the AI-induced power scramble, they’re becoming a key part of plan A — one that’s increasingly needed to get connected to the grid in the first place.
