The potential for flexible data centers

Tyler Norris says regulators have been getting two different stories. On one side, they’ve been hearing that data centers are largely inflexible loads. On the other, last year the U. S. Department of Energy recommended data center flexibility, and EPRI launched its DCFlex initiative to demonstrate the same. So he and a few other researchers wanted to know, What’s the potential for data center flexibility? And what benefits could it have system-wide? In this episode, Shayle talks to Tyler, a PhD candidate at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment and former vice president of development at Cypress Creek Renewables. In a recent study, Tyler and his co-authors found there’s enough spare capacity in the existing U. S. grid to accommodate up to 98 gigawatts of new industrial load (enough for multiple Project Stargates), if that load can curtail 0.5% of annual load to avoid adding to system peaks. Shayle and Tyler unpack the study’s findings, including: How much data centers would have to curtail and how often Options for shaving peaks, like colocating or leasing generation, spatial flexibility, and deferring or front loading training runs Speeding up interconnection if the data center is able to curtail load How bridge power could transition to peak shaving backup generation Recommended resources Nicholas Institute for Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Duke University: Rethinking Load Growth: Assessing the Potential for Integration of Large Flexible Loads in US Power Systems Latitude Media: EPRI takes its data center flexibility project global Latitude Media: Who’s really paying to power Big Tech’s AI ambitions? Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by Daniel Woldorff. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is executive editor. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hey, it's Executive Editor Stephen Lacey. Many of you were loyal listeners to a show I created and co-hosted for eight years called The Energy Gang. Well, we're back. Jigar Shah, Catherine Hamilton, and I are excited to announce our latest project, a weekly news roundtable called Open Circuit. Every week, we'll break down how major projects come together, how deals and policies get structured, and what it takes to build critical infrastructure at scale, all through the lens of current events. You can subscribe to Open Circuit wherever you listen to podcasts or follow it at latitude media dot com.

• 0:35Speaker 01

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• 0:40Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.

• 0:44Speaker 03

  What we're hearing, right, the tip of the spear and what would really present a value proposition for the hyperscalers and the large colocation data centers would be if you can actually interconnect them to the grid more quickly if they're able to offer this flexibility.

• 0:59Shayle Kann?

  Coming up, could load flexibility add something like 90 gigawatts of additional data center capacity to the US grid?

• 1:15Speaker 04

  Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner behind the most influential companies in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped ambitious companies stand out, build market leadership, and become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  The power plant for the modern grid isn't a building, it's a network. Energy Hub's derm's platform connects batteries, EVs, thermostats, and commercial and industrial sites into virtual power plants that over 230 utilities dispatch as reliable grid capacity day in, day out. VPPs deploy in 60 to 100 days at 40 to 60% less cost than traditional infrastructure, and they perform like conventional generation from day one. Learn about the flexibility platform for the modern grid at energyhub.com.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Demand flexibility is now an essential part of the data center's speed to power playbook. But how do data centers actually curtail load? GridBeyond is the end-to-end solution for flexible energy management. GridBeyond's advanced DERS and VPP platform is tailored to what data centers care about most. Maximizing reliability, intelligently meeting curtailment obligations, reducing costs, and managing all your distributed resources in one place. Ready to transform your distributed energy management? Get started at gridbeyond.com.

• 2:47Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I lead the Frontier Strategy at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. All right, so data centers generally like to operate all the time, not necessarily 24/7 from a grid perspective, but 24/7 from an operations perspective. And there are a bunch of reasons for that, and it varies a little bit based on the type and the use case, but as a rule, that is true. However, there is a good case to be made that if they operated from a grid perspective, very close to 24/7, but not quite all the way there, or if they had sufficient onsite generation to avoid pulling from the grid for just a little bit of time each year, you might be able to build a lot more of them much faster. And more plus faster is basically the name of the game

• 3:32Shayle Kann?

  in data centers at the moment. It's for sure easier said than done, though, and it's not a panacea. It is really interesting, though, and we're starting to see glimmers of programs and tariffs that drive this across the US. Tyler Norris, who's been on this podcast before, recently published a really good paper trying to quantify the amount of additional load you could add to the grid if that load were just a little bit flexible. He published it through Duke University, and the numbers are pretty eye-watering. So I wanted to bring him on to talk about it because, as always, the devil is in the details in these things. So here's Tyler to talk through the details. Tyler, welcome.

• 4:10Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me here, Sheil.

• 4:12Shayle Kann?

  Excited to talk about large flexible loads with you. We're talking about large flexible loads, but like, can we just say data centers? Data centers is most of what we mean here, right? I mean, I presume you're also, this applies to manufacturing and other large loads. But really, like, the purpose, I assume, is that we have an enormous spate of data centers that are soon to hit the grid. And your question had to do mostly with that. Is that like an appropriate statement?

• 4:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what really opened our eyes were some of these forecasts suggesting that AI's specialized data centers are going to be likely the single largest driver of US electricity load growth for the next five to seven years, with some numbers suggesting about 44% of all US load growth will be from data centers.

• 4:57Shayle Kann?

  Right, okay, so we'll talk about large loads, we'll talk about data centers, we'll kind of use them interchangeably, even though they're not exactly the same thing. But why don't you start by just laying out the fundamental thesis of this paper and maybe the key findings as you see them? And I think we can dive into a bunch of the details and nuances from there.

• 5:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure thing. Well, the origin of the paper was conversations with utility regulators in the Southeast in the fall. And everyone's trying to figure out how to deal with load growth. And what the regulators said to us is that we've heard that the data centers are 100% inflexible. And so we're just assuming we have to plan for all of this as firm load. At the same time, the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board had come out with recommendations around data center flexibility. And then EP relaunched its data center flexibility initiative. And so there was this kind of weird juxtaposition happening where they were being told data centers are 100% inflexible, but others were suggesting they may be flexible.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  And so that was the prompt to us to dig into this and try to figure out what's going on. And we decided to do some modeling around it. And initially, we were just going to run this notion of curtailment at 1% to 5% of the max annual potential use of the data centers, because that sort of aligns with the existing demand response program requirements for peak shaving, sort of in that 1% to 2% range. But

• 6:24Shayle Kann?

  Can I just clarify that what you're saying is that that's a percentage of hours in the year, right? So 1 to 5% or 1 to 2% of total hours where effectively the data center from the perspective of the grid would have to shut off.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  That's right. Or yeah, 1 to 5% of their max potential energy use over the course of a year.

• 6:42Shayle Kann?

  Oh, right. There is a distinction there, right? It's not necessarily X number of hours where they're at 0% capacity. It is relative to, I guess it's a percentage of total load that they would pull if they're operating at 100% capacity, 100% of the hours of the year. So there could be times when it's 10 hours at 50% and other times when it's five hours at 0%.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  Exactly. Exactly. So we assumed actually 100% utilization. So constant load additions for the purposes of the modeling. But so we were going to run it at, yeah, 1 to 5% and kind of that 1 to 2% being in line with existing demand response program requirements and 5% just being like a high upper end scenario for calibration. And what we found that the numbers were so substantial in terms of how much new data center load you could add to the grid that we decided to run it at 0.5% and then again 0.25%. And to be honest, we were, we were very surprised by the amount of headroom that appears to be

• 7:47Speaker 03

  available on a large number of balancing authorities. And so we ran it for 22 of the largest US balancing authorities, which is about 95% of the country's load. And what we found is that 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 US. And at 0.25% curtailment of the new load, you could add 76 gigawatts. And so what we're talking about there is basically between like three to five Project Stargates, which you know is the the mega data center initiative announced by President

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Trump and OpenAI in January.

• 8:33Shayle Kann?

  Right, or I guess another way to contextualize that is we have, I don't know exactly what the number is today, but we have sub thirty gigawatts of data centers currently operating on the grid. So you're talking about with a half a percent curtailment, tripling that plus or minus, something like that, which is which is above most of the forecasts for at least the toward the end of the decade, the next few years. But I want to dig into what that actually means because I think it is, it's, it's, it's an astounding number, but there's more to it than than meets the eye. It's probably harder than it sounds. But so the basic thing that you're saying is that you looked at these balancing authorities

• 9:08Shayle Kann?

  and you said, how much more flat load could you add if you shaved the peaks, basically? Not the peaks of the load, but if if you curtailed when there are system peaks. And as we know, I think it probably most of the folks listening to this podcast know, the way that the electricity system works is it's basically designed for peak. And so because we have peaks and valleys in in demand and load, now the systems are designed to make sure that you have enough power, enough generation that is deliverable at the peakiest peak of the year. And so this is basically saying if you added a lot of data centers,

• 9:48Shayle Kann?

  but they did not contribute to those peakiest peaks, how much could you add? And that's where you get these like astounding large numbers. Do I basically have that right?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  That's right, Shayle. And just to put some numbers to that utilization rate that you mentioned. So you said it exactly right. We build the entire power system around these occasional extreme peaks that are driven by either extreme heat or cold snaps, especially these polar vortex events. But but just to quantify it, right? So in ninety percent of hours, more than thirty percent of the power system sits unused. And we actually found that on average across those 22 balancing authorities that the average load factor, meaning the average consumption over the peak consumption is 53%. So what that basically means is that in any given hour,

• 10:38Speaker 03

  on average, approximately half of all generation and transmission infrastructure is unused on average in the US. And it's actually worse than that because you're not counting for all the reserve margin that's on top of those existing peaks.

• 10:53Shayle Kann?

  And some of that, of course, is that we have some generators that are not designed to run all the time, peakers, right? Like, the definition of a peaker is to solve peak. And so those are built to operate at low capacity factor. So in a world where you do all add all of this flat load minus the peaky events, is one of the results because the concept you're saying is that we could add all that load to the grid without building any new generating capacity. Right? So presumably what would happen then is you would end up operating all of your existing assets at higher capacity factor, which means like you'd be running your peakers 24/7 or closer to 24/7, which would be expensive and suboptimal,

• 11:37Shayle Kann?

  I think, given how the system is built right now. Like, is that a challenge to this model?

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Well, you could do it that way, but that's not actually the way we did this. So what we did is we took the existing realized peaks on each of the balancing authorities over the past nine years and calibrated to that. So we didn't want the new load added on top of existing load to ever result in a realized peak above those existing peaks. And so we were actually discounting all the reserve margin that's available on top of the existing realized peaks. And so if you if you actually accounted for all the reserve margin, the numbers here would be higher, but they'd also be shaved off by accounting for other constraints like transmission constraints

• 12:22Speaker 03

  and the intertemporal constraints on the generation and the load. But yeah, so I just want to be clear, like what we're talking about here is not tapping into all of that dirtier inefficient reserve margin. Now, you would still, I mean, if you add new load to any given system without a change in the generation mix, you're by definition going to be running some units at higher capacity factor. But that's a given regardless. By having the flexible load, you actually get to, you don't have to run the dirtiest, most inefficient units as often, right? Because you're not having to tap into that reserve margin. And then you can get into the question of like, okay, for any given investment to change the generation mix, what are the the second order effects of that?

• 13:07Speaker 03

  But that's sort of a different question.

• 13:09Shayle Kann?

  Mm hmm. I mean, you mentioned before that you were initially modeling this off of like typical demand response program frequency. Is there anything different about what you're proposing in terms of the curtailment? Not the frequency necessarily, but the type of curtailment versus demand response programs? Like, is there a is there a shorthand version of the takeaway from this paper, which is basically enroll every data center in a demand response program? And you've like solved a lot of problems?

• 13:36Speaker 03

  That would be a, you know, a simplistic way of looking at it. But I so I think there's one really key distinction from existing demand response programs. And that is that 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, they planned for that load as firm. And then at a later date, once that load was online, it decided to participate in demand response for economic reasons, right? But what we're talking about in this case is pulling all this up into the planning realm.

• 14:19Speaker 03

  And it's sort of like how, you know, we're trying to get a lot more sophisticated. With transmission planning, it's like that, but trying to get more sophisticated with our load planning. And so just to articulate, I mean, I think what we're hearing, right? The tip of the spear and what would really present a value proposition for the hyperscalers and the large colocation data centers would be if you can actually interconnect them to the grid more quickly if they're able to offer this flexibility.

• 14:47Shayle Kann?

  Right, which we've started to hear a little bit about, right? Some some utilities are starting to say, here's a program, here's what I need. It's either generic program, like here's the version of demand response, or it's specific to a given customer, a given location, and they're saying, we can interconnect you in eight years, or we can interconnect you in four years if you're willing to curtail somewhat. It's that kind of thing that you're talking about.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so we see that in a limited number of jurisdictions, right? So ERCOT has this controllable load service, which does make that sort of trade off explicit. PG&E is doing it with their new Flex Connect program, primarily at distribution scale for EV chargers, but the hope is to expand it. And then Southern California Edison has a similar program. But we are lacking in sort of established official service offerings to large loads that specifically sort of quantify like, what is that trade off for faster interconnect and exchange for flexibility? And that's what I think we're hoping to see promulgated across more jurisdictions.

• 15:54Speaker 04

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• 16:38Speaker 00

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• 17:20Speaker 04

  For data centers, connecting to the grid quickly means two things: building distributed energy and having a plan for demand flexibility. GridBeyond helps with both. GridBeyond's DERMs and VPP platform unlocks the potential of distributed assets and dispatches flexibility into the right market at the right time. And this is more than software. GridBeyond supports developers every step of the way. From modeling your highest ROI energy mix to orchestrating the full set of assets around a data center, the track record speaks for itself. GridBeyond manages over 1,400 sites and more than 3.7 gigawatts of load across Europe, the UK, and the US. Learn more at gridbeyond.com or click the link in the show notes.

• 18:04Shayle Kann?

  I guess I want to get a little bit more into what that curtailment actually would look like. So as you said, you ended up modeling it out on very infrequent, or at least very low-level curtailment, 0.5% or 0.25%. How much are those times predictable a priori? Like, how would this actually work in your mind? Is it like it's traditional demand response program? The deal is like, you know, the utility or whoever it is says, "Okay, we need to shut you off," or "We need to close you down to some degree X number of hours per year, and we're going to give you one day notice when it's going to happen." And we have a cap on how much we could do that. Is it that kind of a thing?

• 18:46Speaker 03

  I think the program structure is likely to look something like that. I mean, obviously, the more controllable the load is on a real-time basis, the more valuable it's going to be to the system for flexibility. But... You know, especially in the context when we're talking about a limited number of extreme weather systems that are really driving these extreme peaks, you know, our weather forecasting fortunately is getting a lot better, right? So like we can see incoming polar vortex events, you know, up to two weeks out and certainly within a week and begin to sort of plan around that. But the other finding, and we wanted to look at, you know, what does this look like

• 19:26Speaker 03

  in terms of how much of the new load is curtailed for a given number of hours? And because because I think initially we would have assumed, right, that a lot of times we are talking about, you know, 100% curtailment of this new load. But 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 load is retained. And then in 50 of those 85 hours, at least 75% of the loads are retained. So we're really talking about partial curtailment here in the vast

• 20:10Speaker 03

  majority of cases. And, you know, in terms of what this would actually look like for the load, I mean, presumably with the data centers, right, they want to maintain high uptime for the servers. And so that's why there's been so much focus on, you know, onsite power and storage and this whole discussion around colocation and even with existing power plants. So that's of course, one of the primary options. But as you know, there's, there's a lot of progress happening and, you know, the ability to defer computational loads, especially some of the, some of the training loads that are more deferrable and batchable. So, and, you know, the average duration of these extreme peaks, you know, we're talking sort of in the

• 20:51Speaker 03

  range of like two and a half to five hours. So you're either, you know, deferring or front loading that, that training run. And then this, you know, spatial flexibility, right? The ability to distribute those workloads to one or multiple data centers located in different, different markets. Google obviously has been, you know, the most public in sort of advertising that capability. A little unclear if the other hyperscalers are developing it, but, you know, you would imagine will move in that direction. And then I'll just mention, you know, of course, there's this other category, which is they could simply reduce operations temporarily. That's unlikely to be as preferable for the data centers, although

• 21:32Speaker 03

  Let's be clear, right? Like a substantial portion of the load for data centers is the cooling infrastructure, right? So you can imagine like here in the Southeast, our worst sort of peaking events now where you have the highest loss of load expectation is on winter mornings during polar vortexes. So you know, you're probably not going to need to run the cooling infrastructure at, you know, 100% utilization on an extremely cold winter morning, right? For the data center. So you can get some headroom out of that. But, you know, as we know, 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 or a handful of minutes.

• 22:16Shayle Kann?

  One thing that we've been seeing a fair bit that I'm curious whether you have been seeing as well. So lots of new data centers are, you mentioned this, right? Bringing their own generation. And that could be renewables and batteries, but it's often natural gas generators. And they're doing that to increase time to power. I'm sorry, decrease time to power, increase speed to power, I should say. And in some cases, what they're doing is operating off-grid or semi-off-grid, they're doing bridge power, right? That's the term people are using for it, where they bring their own generation until they can get the full grid connection in place. And so one thing we started to hear about a little bit, which, which might be a solution to what you're describing is if they're going to bring bridge power anyway,

• 23:01Shayle Kann?

  they've already got generating assets sitting on site. So maybe what you do is you operate those assets at full bore for as long as you need the bridge. But once the grid connection is there for you and all the equipment is there for you, then that same asset turns from a high utilization bridge power thing to a very low utilization curtailment thing. And you just operate at half a percent of the hours of the year. And that would be difficult economically in any other condition, except that you already basically amortized it because you were using it as primary power for some period of time. Do you see that as being like a scalable? Solution here?

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think it's critical to mention, right? This could be entirely what we call sort of provisional, right? A temporary arrangement until all the firm upgrades are done. And so I think that's likely, you know, what would be even perhaps more economical is if it was possible to do that on kind of like a leasing model where the data center would lease onsite power from a third party that then, once the firm upgrades are in place, that onsite power source could be taken to another location. And that's what we're hearing. Actually, I was just talking to someone in California a few weeks ago. He's developing a business model just like that, but around lithium ion battery storage. So the idea is they will truck in these batteries

• 24:26Speaker 03

  while the, you know, the large load is waiting on the firm upgrades to get done. And then, once they're in place, they will take that to another customer. So that would be, from like a resource efficiency standpoint, that would be the better way to do it. Obviously, you can't do that with all onsite power infrastructure. So there's going to be some variation there.

• 24:46Shayle Kann?

  Okay. So then I think the other big question here is that like the, to some extent, the fundamental premise of the research that you're doing was that the constraint on this load growth is generation, is the ability to serve enough power to meet the peak load that these new data centers and other large loads will introduce. That certainly is going to be true in some cases, but it is also certainly true that in many cases, the main constraint, the rate limiter, is not generation, but deliverability. It's transmission and distribution infrastructure. So do you have any sense, like of the 98 gigawatts that you could add from a generation perspective, like how much of that could you actually add?

• 25:31Shayle Kann?

  Or how much would you end up just getting constrained by T and D anyway?

• 25:34Speaker 03

  There's really no way to know without running it. And every jurisdiction is different. Every portion of the network is slightly different. So it's hard to put a number on it. If I was forced to, I'd probably say something like 10%. You know, it's gonna gonna be eroded, but you just won't know.

• 25:53Shayle Kann?

  Is that all? Really? You think it's that?

• 25:54Speaker 03

  This is that's just my very rough.

• 25:56Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, finger in the air.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  You know, first order estimate, just me talking. But you won't know, and we want to be clear. Well, let me take a couple of things. One is, you know, we want to be crystal clear that, you know, we don't want to discourage investment in new generation and transmission infrastructure. We're going to need it for a whole bunch of reasons, including all the other loads that are coming in as well as, you know, decarbonization priorities and just improvements in reliability. And we also acknowledge there are very often going to be local network constraints that are going to be going to be a barrier, but it's it's critical, and you said the right word, deliverability. It's a misnomer, by the way, because it doesn't actually imply that without deliverability, you can't deliver electrons to load.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  What it means is that under the most extreme system conditions during both contingencies and the need to run all local capacity generators at the same time, that you don't have any bottlenecks. And, you know, it's not to say that there's this because the conditions don't or never occur. They're just extremely rare. So it's just, it's a very, very rigorous sort of study criteria. And the bottom line is like, we can get a lot of load and generators online, by the way, without having to have upfront deliverability. And then you can work on those full deliverability upgrades in the background. And right, that's exactly what ORCOT does right for generation.

• 27:26Speaker 03

  They they don't require upfront deliverability and it allows them to get generation online much more quickly and at much higher rates.

• 27:33Shayle Kann?

  I guess final question for you is, there it's you described at the beginning, there's this interesting dichotomy in the market right now where there's a premise, and I've heard this from many of the data center developers and hyperscalers as well, that we are not flexible load. We need to operate 24/7. On the other hand, there's this constraint and everybody is starting to say, oh, wait, we're going to have to figure out how to square this circle. It's been a few weeks since you published this. Report, have you had reactions from, I guess, either from either side of this equation, from the grid operators or from the data center world on like, how much could this, how much does this suggest we should just move quickly on demand response type programs?

• 28:17Shayle Kann?

  Or as you said, the type of program where there's a deal in exchange for faster time to power? Like, is there momentum around this? Or do you feel like you're like fighting an uphill battle for some reason?

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, great question. So I want to say one thing upfront. I don't know where this idea came from of 24/7. They are not 24/7 loads. And it's critical to clarify this. So the servers may be 24/7, right? The chips themselves. But there's an enormous amount of cooling infrastructure and other infrastructure around those servers. So, so actually like Lawrence Berkeley Lab and their recent data center energy usage report in December that was congression mandated, they put out the number 50% utilization rate. EIA and E3 have used a number closer to 85% utilization. But just want to be clear, like, these are, these are not like, you're not running the data centers that there were 100% potential max draw at, you know, 100% of the hours.

• 29:12Speaker 03

  So I'm hopeful that we can just like further clear, because I think the regulators in particular have been very confused by this. So, you know, good to establish that. But to your question, it's, it's a really interesting dynamic, right? I mean, we're in such a hyper competitive environment where I think, you know, the hyperscalers and even some of the, you know, these colocation data center developers, you know, they don't necessarily want to be 100% forthcoming about the extent of their capabilities. And to the extent they are going to be forthcoming about them, you know, they want to be compensated for those capabilities wherever possible. But they certainly don't want their competitors to know, you know, what, what they're fully capable of.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  And the other thing is, I think the whole market environment in terms of like what type of contracts everyone is used to, whether it's the owner operator or their financing counterparties, it's like everyone is just much more used to, right, like firm service. And that's just kind of the gold standard. And I think part of it is that we need to get more of the parties used to these sort of quasi-firm arrangements and to actually see those banked so that more market participants can get comfortable with it. I think the tip of the spear there is likely to be, as you said, you know, faster speed to power in exchange for flexibility. And once we see some of those deals set up and executed and

• 30:37Speaker 03

  we see the capabilities are working, I think the hope is that that will then proliferate beyond necessarily, you know, being restricted just to just to speed to market. But it's it's an interesting dance right now. I think these, I mean, I hear about it almost every week, like these conversations are happening. There is happening primarily on a bilateral sort of confidential basis between large loads and transmission providers. So there isn't necessarily a big push, I think, from either of those parties to make these like public, you know, established tariffs. But I think that is where we're going. And we were, you know, quite surprised last week when Duke Energy said at a public event that

• 31:18Speaker 03

  they are now going to require all new hyperscale loads above 100 megawatts of participating demand response. And we're hearing a lot of interest from other state regulators in this too. So I think hopefully we'll get some of these tariffs set up over the next year or so, and then the market will kind of evolve from there.

• 31:36Shayle Kann?

  All right, Tyler, super interesting. I think you sort of hit this all at the right the right moment for this conversation. So I'm glad you did and put some numbers to it. We will, we'll talk more about it as this this dynamic world evolves. But thanks so much for the time.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Thanks, Shale.

• 31:54Shayle Kann?

  Tyler Norris is a PhD candidate at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. He's also a former VP of Development at Cypress Creek Renewables. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude backs visionaries accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.