Partnering with Piclo Energy

Accelerated Community Energy (ACE) is the BYODC market of the future

We’ve all seen the numbers. Data center demand for grid power is projected to rise 22 percent year over year and could triple by 2030. In Virginia, the epicenter of America’s data center buildout, demand will exceed 12 gigawatts this year. Texas is close behind. PJM projects it will fall more than six gigawatts short of reliability requirements by 2027. After two decades of flat electricity consumption, American utilities face load growth unlike anything forecasted in their IRPs.

The response, so far, has been a combination of slow-rolling interconnection queues and reallocating costs to data center developers. Ohio now requires data centers to pay for 85 percent of their subscribed capacity regardless of actual usage. California’s SB 887 would make data centers pay full infrastructure costs in exchange for expedited permitting. These measures are fundamentally defensive. They slow the problem without solving it.

Like everyone else in the energy industry, we have been doing a lot of thinking about this issue. As energy consumers, we’ve seen our rates increase, even before data centers starting adding stress on the grid. As domain experts, we know that there are elegant solutions possible. We also know that existing regulatory and market pathologies prevent many of these solutions from getting deployed in the first place.

A few months ago, our friends at Piclo Energy started talking about ACE - Accelerated Community Energy. The basic idea builds on a lot of the work we’ve been doing with our Repowering Communities initiative, and with other partners like Rewiring America, to figure out how to source new energy capacity by deploying distributed energy resources.

After a few conversations with the team at Piclo, we realized that our two platforms would actually complement each other quite nicely. Piclo’s marketplace enables procurement and price discovery for DERs. Aristotle and WEATS provide the measurement and verification and system of record required for robust demand-side energy markets.

Community Energy

We decided to collaborate around our shared vision for Community Energy. We wondered what it would look like if utilities and regulators could require data centers to invest in local clean energy development. Could they implement a sort of “Community Portfolio Standard” in which the data center would procure a certain amount of its energy from local distributed energy resources, and receive credit for the new capacity available to the grid?

Today we are excited to release the first version of that vision in the form of a white paper that we authored together. Linked below, the paper explores how utilities can mobilize new investments into community-based energy projects so that, even as they say yes to new data center development, utilities and regulators are also protecting their customers and ratepayers from increased rates, and ensuring that jobs will be created within their communities.

Accelerated Community Energy White Paper (link)

Obviously, a white paper is just a first step. We are looking forward to rolling out this vision over the next few months with our early partners. But the choice for utilities is now clear - do you trade away your customers’ future in exchange for quick profits? Or do you ensure long-term investments in your communities? The next few months will reveal where they really stand on this question.