The Electric Power Research Institute is expanding its data center flexibility demonstration project outside the U.S. — and has already signed on new European participants.
The project, known as DCFlex, explores how data centers can be leveraged as flexibility assets for the grid. First launched in October 2024 with around 15 utility companies, independent power producers, and data center operators, it now counts nearly 40 participants, including Dominion Energy, ERCOT, PJM, Google, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The latest joiners are the French transmission system operator RTE, the French equipment supplier, the Dutch financial services company ING, and the Greek utility PPC Group.
The near-term goal? To establish five to 10 flexibility hubs, where participants will experiment with flexibility options such as computational flexibility, backup generators, or onsite solar assets.
Tom Wilson, EPRI’s principal technical executive in the integrated grid and energy systems division, told Latitude Media that while those demonstrations haven’t yet begun, “the airplane is taking off now,” and that members have started submitting proposals. EPRI hopes to have some projects underway “by the second half of the year.”
“We had initial discussions in January with all the members together — really spirited, lots of diverse ideas — so you can already see the benefits of some of the conversations… to get a common understanding of what our problem is,” Wilson said.
A global project
The announcement of the new European participants is the first step in what’s meant to be a global expansion of the project. EPRI has members in 40 countries, and it is currently evaluating interest from organizations from the Arab states of the Persian Gulf.
In addition to exploring flexibility options for data centers and finding the best way to integrate them into the grid, the program also aims to look at “the policies, procedures, [and] legal emission standards” that influence “what types of flexibility work in different markets,” Wilson noted.
“For that, it is really important to get examples from around the world with different regulatory schemes, market schemes, legal schemes, and different emission objectives,” he said, adding that the requirements for interconnecting data centers differ in almost every jurisdiction, even as European countries tend to have more defined and restrictive regulations.
France, for instance, which has long been a major producer of nuclear power, may find that flexibility solutions involving nuclear technologies make more sense there than in many other countries.
And in Ireland, where the grid is so overwhelmed by load growth that its operator paused data center interconnection agreements in the Dublin area until 2028, the Commission for Regulation of Utilities recently published a proposed decision paper that would require new data centers to have on-site generation to connect to the grid, something that, if approved, would set the country apart from its neighbors.
DCFlex’s quick expansion since its launch is emblematic of the industry’s mounting awareness of the necessity and potential of flexibility for data centers.
Recently, a Duke University study showed that the existing U.S. power system could unlock over 100 gigawatts of new load through flexibility solutions alone. Given the combined forces of unprecedented load growth, expanding interconnection queues, and gigawatt-scale data center proposals, that’s an advantage that data center operators cannot ignore — despite a history of reluctance to adopt flexibility solutions.
Until about 2022, data centers connection requests were an obvious yes for most utilities; they offered a reliable, large contribution to the bottom line, and usually had capacity to spare. As a result, Wilson said they “didn’t really need flexibility.”
However, in July 2022, Virginia’s Dominion Power said demand had increased so much that the utility simply could not take any more, because they didn’t have the capacity to serve them. (Dominion serves the so-called “Data Center Alley,” where data centers have clustered outside of Washington, D.C.)
And in the years since, other utilities have found themselves in the same position — hence the apparent appeal of the DCFlex approach for both power providers and the data centers seeking power.
Flexibility doesn’t just offer the incentive of cutting electricity costs, but also of securing a faster connection to the grid.
“Electricity is a small percentage of [data centers’] cost… so the idea of pausing their training to save pennies doesn’t make sense, but the idea of pausing their training for a few hours a year in order to be connected and have a bigger training set does make sense,” Wilson said. “That’s why they’re coming to the table. It’s a new world.”
