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John Belizaire says he has a secret hiding in plain sight. But before revealing it, the CEO of Soluna, a green data center development firm headquartered in Albany, New York, asks people to picture the last time they drove through a gusty stretch of countryside and saw wind turbines in the distance. But when they zoom into that frame, he asks, did they notice that not all of those turbines were spinning despite it being windy?
It’s not typically because they’re broken, Belizaire said. It’s because they’ve been turned off.
Electric grids across the country don’t always have the capacity to carry all of the energy an intermittent power plant can produce. So while at times there’s more than enough wind to produce more power, Belizaire said, there’s no place for that power to go due to aging transmission systems and a lack of local load.
That’s how we end up with stranded renewable energy—available energy going to waste because there isn’t a user for it. In an analysis of hundreds of renewable projects around the country, Soluna estimates upwards of 30 to 40 percent of renewable energy goes unused.
That’s the secret. There’s power already generated and ready to use, it’s just being curtailed, Belizaire said.
As power demand surges, largely due to data centers servicing artificial intelligence products and cryptocurrency, interested developers, power plant operators and environmentalists are trying to sort out how to use the full capabilities of existing renewable power plants. These decisions are playing out as more data center developers supply their own gas plants to secure onsite power and bypass lengthy wait times to connect to the grid.
More than a third of data centers are expected to adopt onsite power generation by 2030, according to a new survey of data center operators, utility companies, and service providers from Bloom Energy, a fuel cell technology company. By 2035, that figure climbs to nearly half.
Data center developers want to have control over their timelines and have immediate access to power, said Aman Joshi, Bloom Energy’s chief commercial officer. The firm’s survey found there’s a one-to-two-year gap between when developers expect grid power and when utilities can realistically deliver it.