The energy transition is accelerating, and utilities are facing unprecedented complexity in both planning and operations. Current practices are hampered by siloed, manual, and reactive planning—where studies take months, data quality is poor, and worst-case scenarios dominate—leading to overbuilt infrastructure and inefficiencies. AI, particularly physics-informed machine learning, offers a transformative solution by enabling real-time, accurate, and deterministic grid simulations. These models can be trained at low cost on each utility’s proprietary data, delivering results in minutes instead of months, and can generate optimized solutions for scenarios like renewable integration or data center load growth. In operations, AI improves alarm management, dispatch efficiency, and post-event analysis by creating closed-loop learning from daily events—something absent in current systems. Despite automation, the gap between planning and operations remains wide due to data fragmentation and lack of integration across timeframes. While behind-the-meter data center microgrids provide short-term capacity relief, they introduce operational complexity and instability. A more sustainable path is to treat data centers as "micro-utilities" with shared responsibilities and modern grid practices, ensuring they contribute to overall grid resilience rather than acting as isolated islands. This shift—driven by AI and a more integrated, data-driven approach—will redefine how utilities plan, operate, and respond in the evolving energy era.
LATITUDE MEDIA COVERING THE NEW FRONTIERS OF THE ENERGY TRANSITION
I'm Shail Khan. I invest in early-stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst.
All right, let me just say that it's an incredibly exciting time in the energy world,
and in electricity in particular, for many reasons that you already know and I don't need to explain.
And it has, for me at least, been great to see so many people start paying more attention to
energy over the past, I don't know, 24, 36 months, something like that. But I will admit a little bit
of frustration with a particular crowd that is constantly referencing the, quote, broken grid,
unquote, that needs fixing, knowing full well that most of these people have absolutely no idea how
utilities actually work. Even setting that aside, I think very few people outside utilities know
what actually goes on inside their planning and operations functions. But once you do start to
see inside, I think,
conclusions sort of naturally fall out. First, it's wildly impressive, and we are all fortunate
to be afforded the degree of reliability and even affordability that modern society gives us with
electricity. And I say that as a Californian who pays over 40 cents a kilowatt hour for power and
sometimes experiences wildfire-driven proactive power shutoffs. Okay, but the second conclusion is,
oh man, what a future AI might deliver here. So I wanted to talk about that second one,
I brought on Josh Wong. Josh is the CEO and founder of ThinkLabs, where we at EIP are investors.
ThinkLabs is leveraging AI in both utility planning and in operations. We talked both
about how things work today and how they'll change in the future. Josh is coming up after the break.
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at energyhub.com. Josh, welcome.
Thank you, Shale. Great to be here.
It's crazy that it has taken me this long to have you on, but I'm excited to finally have you here
to help explain how utilities actually work, or at least part of the utility functions. I think
we're going to talk about two parts that, as you've pointed out to me separately, do converge,
but I want to talk about them somewhat separately. The first being planning, how utilities plan,
and the second being operations. What are they doing day-to-day to maintain the grid?
So let's start with planning.
Sounds good.
What is. Yeah.
In the modern day, but prior to, you know, revolutionization by AI, what does utility
resource planning actually look like inside the utility?
Yeah, there's many parts of planning. When you say resource, it might be integrated resource
on the bulk power system, or with centralized generation, there's transmission planning,
there's distribution planning, then there is DER planning. Each one of these are on silos.
And recently, just talking to a very large East Coast IOU, even
transmission planning, there are like 12 departments doing their own thing. And each time a study is
done, it's completely separate and siloed. So each use case is like a study. You want to connect a
generator, it's a study. If you want to connect a load, it's a different type of study. But the
underlying model is still the same. So studies today, I would say half, if not more of the time,
especially for distribution, is on cleaning up data. So data is in a ton of different places,
data quality is not too par, and a lot of manual effort is required to pull data together.
Then you run the analysis, which is really tuned for a worst case scenario planning. What's the
five hours of the year that's going to be worst case for the next 10 years, and you plan to that
level of standard. Now people are improving, like looking at 96 hours per year, 288 hours per year,
so each of those are like high, best case and low cases on weeks of the season or month over the
years. And I would say the gold standard today is probably 8760, which is like 24 hours by 375. So
every hour of the year for profile analysis, great for battery storage, which you will need to charge
and discharge. And also really necessary if you start looking at things like load flexibility. But people are not there yet. I think by and large, it's
still worst case scenario planning. And this process just repeats over and over again. We call
these restudies. When I used to be a planning engineer, when I started my career, we say
planning engineers are always right, because we can always blame it on the assumptions.
But we are always wrong because the assumptions are never correct. And so it becomes this vicious
cycle of blaming data, etc. And now I think the greatest place where we stuck though, is
all the studies tells you problems, not solutions. So you run a study through, let's say, a decades
old tool for distribution and transmission planning. And it says, hey, you have all these
like congestions and these locations, whether in under contingency or not, and you have voltage
violations here and there. So red lights or yellow light, you cannot connect to the grid,
restrict access or build more lines. But the actual solutioning depends on the planner.
And it's completely about trial and error, or in other words, experience. And so each time the
engineer sees, okay, I have a sea of red here, all these problems, how do I solve it? In the past,
it's fine, because it's all upgrade, build more substations, add more wires, more transformers,
that's fine. But that's not going to cut it right now because of affordability and supply chain
ish lags, etc. So now we have a ton of other options. Should we
flex like curtail, curtail generation or curtail load? Should we add a battery? Where? How big?
When do we charge and discharge? That's an operational issue, again, hints into operations.
Or should we switch the grid around? Well, that's operations. Planners shouldn't care about switching,
but it is getting more important. And then we do have to upgrade our lines. I think Ferg recently
just said, we do need to reinforce the backbone of our infrastructure. But how much should we do it after
giving preference to flexibility? Or should we bring your own capacity? And where? And so there's
all these millions of lines and quadrillions of combinations of lines we can build, but where and
how much? And trial and error is not going to cut it. So I think we're at a time where we are
completely overwhelmed by these manual processes, restudies, and just, I would say, shot in the dark
type of trial and error on what type of solutions we can use to mitigate the
grid. And that's where we're getting stuck. There's an extent to which, when you describe
it that way, the studies and restudies and the judgment required by the planners, your former
colleagues, and so on, there's an extent to which my reaction is like, it's remarkably impressive
that we have the reliability that we do have, right? We actually have quite good reliability,
right? And it's worked for quite a long time. Do you think that that is because, as you said,
planning is built around, let's make sure we solve for the worst case scenario? And so is the net
result of that, that we have high reliability, but a lot of overbuild, basically?
I do think the grid is the, as we call it, the human's most complex and largest machine
is an act of miracle. Like, it is impressive how much reliability gives us and how much
we all depend on it for all, like, livelihood, social, economic development, security, etc.
And it's been keeping us doing well for what we need it to be. And I think redundancy is one thing,
but it is an engineering marvel for its time. I just think it sort of failed to keep up with the
digitalization and the modernization process, especially for the last, like, two decades or so.
But we're very good at building infrastructure, like bare metal, coppers and wires, oil in the
ground, etc. But running a digital. Digital grid as a software company, as a modern company, I think we are just in the beginnings of
that phase.
Back to what actually happened inside of the utility, just to make it more tangible, I think it's easy to imagine the bulk power system.
Somebody says, I want to connect a new generator, or I want to connect a load, I want to connect a data center.
Okay, so somebody inside the utility then has to go run a study and say, okay, you're trying to connect 300 megawatts of load.
Do we have capacity for that?
What happens if X, Y, and Z happens, et cetera?
So that all makes more sense, I think, intuitively than the distribution side.
Where, like, it's less obvious to me what would trigger a study.
Is it just that utilities are cycling through studies of individual feeders all the time?
Or is it like, hey, we noticed that there's a bunch of new load on this feeder, that neighborhood has a bunch of EVs that just suddenly showed up.
We should do a study of whether we need to upgrade a substation.
Like, what does the distribution side look like?
Well, I think it's actually quite common across both, but the characteristics are different.
So I'm trying.
Transmission system, naturally, is one big thing.
So every single time you study an entire region, I think for a cluster study or large load interconnection study,
the grid impact and solution side, I think most utilities are talking about six to nine months to perform one of those studies.
And it's a one-time, right?
So risk of restudies will compound that.
And it does cost internal utility, typically a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
The typical benchmark is about a quarter million dollars per study.
So it is a long time, and it is very expensive.
But you study the whole system at once, and it's completely reactive and ad hoc.
So you basically respond to an interconnection request, and maybe now we can cluster it.
But I think clustering, it's sort of a shortcut because the queue changes all the time.
So even if you cluster it, I think it doesn't add any more certainty to the queue.
Distribution, you have simpler studies, but there are places where it is actually more complicated.
As I mentioned, data quality suffers so much more because the level of coordination
between distribution utilities and transmission and bulk power and the market participants are not there.
So you have less checks and balances and audit trails around distribution data.
And you have a lot more nodes or customers on distribution than on transmission systems.
But the good thing is it can be completely parallelized.
So I can study one feeder at a time, unless you want to study around switching, load transfers, etc.
But the volume is also key.
I think when we did a public study with SCE, I think they were projecting up to 10,000 of these energization requests per month.
And each one of them takes 30 to 45 days.
So if you do it manually and expect different results, do more of the same, it is going to be a massive increase.
And so that's where the scalability, data quality, automation is really key for distribution even more.
Okay, so you've been alluding to this, but let's talk about it directly, which is what changes in a world of AI here.
You've described a bunch of challenges, right?
Like you've got the timeline of all these studies that take a long time.
That's kind of an outcome.
The challenges that lead to that are data quality, particularly at the distribution level.
All the different parts of the system.
All the different parts of the system being siloed and all the studies being siloed and so on.
What does it look like in a native AI world?
And what's the fundamental challenge to get to that?
So AI can be ambiguous.
So I think let's look at general AI and where we have been focusing on.
But I think the origins of ThinkLabs is to ask a big question, right?
Can we automate the grid, whether it's planning or operations similar to how we can drive towards autonomous driving?
So can AI help drive towards that efficiency and autonomy to handle the complexities with human interloop?
So human-centered AI is what we're looking at.
But AI has been historically used for things like data cleansing.
Pattern recognition, right?
Really good for data cleansing.
Forecasting is probably the dominant use case in AI.
And most recently, there's a lot of general AI around.
Like there's massive amounts of data.
Can we retrieve all the data?
Can we retrieve all the records?
Can we learn from manuals?
Can we learn from previous rate filings?
That's great.
For us, we specifically ask, can AI help us plan the grid?
Meaning actually to run a system study.
How does generators and loads and battery storage impact the grid?
If we need to invest in lines or connections, reinforcements, where do we do it?
How do we do it?
How much flexibility versus how much storage versus how much power?
That's a really complex problem.
So can AI help us do that?
And so for us, what AI is, is physics-informed AI.
So can we teach the AI how the grid works?
How power flows?
How voltage traverses through the line?
How loads behave in contingencies?
Where should we put new lines?
Where do we have capacity?
So we need to make sure AI is able to do that.
And for AI to be trustworthy, we need AI to learn the physics of the grid.
And so can we have physics-informed AI?
So teaching the AI how the grid works so that the utility, which is the actual entity to authorize the interconnection,
can actually believe in the results and drive towards actions of the results.
So that's where our, I would say, specialized AI,
works in terms of learning power flow, learning system interconnection impacts,
and learning how to actually plan the grid.
How analogous is that to an LLM?
Like, I think of the, you know, maybe the analogy would be you train an LLM,
or let's say like a coding, an LLM that's good at coding, right?
You have to like train it, it learns how to code.
And then when you're doing inference, you are, you know, using that training
or using the model that has been trained to,
to execute tasks.
Is it a similar thing in the sense that what you have to do is basically train a model
on the physics of the grid, and then once it has been trained,
then the idea is you can query it like you would query an LLM
and get something that is driven by that physics?
That's right.
I think, one, we're not an LLM, but I think the training inferencing process is similar.
An LLM is more meant for generalization.
It learns a lot of stuff, and you can have natural language type of interfaces,
but it is prone to hallucination.
So for us, since we're trying to really bring the world of engineering and AI together,
we really lean into machine learning.
So deep machine learning models, but we are really playing at the intersection of
physics equations and the AI models, the machine learning models themselves.
But what that drives towards is a very deterministic,
so our models actually can't hallucinate.
It's actually deterministic.
You ask it the same thing, it will give you the same answer all the time.
The other thing is you have that type of efficiency,
like the unit economics of AI models.
We're very familiar now with frontier LLMs that will cost billions of dollars to train
and months, if not years, to train as well.
It learns a lot of stuff, but it is a huge, hefty investment.
And you have to generalize it towards everybody.
So it is a jack of all trades, and getting smarter and smarter all the way.
For us, there's a few things.
One is we need to establish security.
So we do models that are exclusive for that utility.
We're not getting one utility's data and trying to cross-train with another utility's data,
because that would violate security of the utilities.
So we actually bring all our AI models into a utility and basically,
train their own "foundation model."
And now you might ask, that's a lot of work to train a foundation model
based on each utility's own proprietary data.
But as a case in point, and we have done that for multiple large IOUs now,
a couple of thousand buses, it takes us about 10 minutes per training run
for a Powerflow model the size of a state, typically, and that 10-minute training
run costs maybe $5 of compute.
And we were able to get Powerflow models that are over 99.9% accurate across all your "system
states," so your voltages, congestions, line flows, voltages, etc.
And so these are small, deep, deterministic, and highly, highly efficient models.
But now what you get, though, is super speed, so studies that would take previously nine months,
I mentioned interconnection studies, now it takes us only a matter of a couple of minutes,
like 10 minutes or less, and it also becomes hyper-parallelizable.
I can completely scale up with more GPUs, so I'm not bounded by CPU compute because
traditional mathematical iteration, iterative techniques like Newton-Raphson techniques
are very much CPU bound.
Now we are working with NVIDIA to see how we can run GPU-native type of calculations,
but that's still evolving.
the last thing, which is,
I would say mind-blowing for us as well,
is that AI can be generative.
It doesn't just give you the problems, right?
In the past, grid simulators only give you problems.
Now we can actually say,
hey, we've learned all these combinations,
but now we can generate solutions.
And to your point, this is where the training comes in.
We have been so used to doing all these studies,
one use case at a time, one study at a time,
and there is no knowledge retention
inside the system itself, in the process itself.
We just keep doing things over and over and over again
with different inputs.
But here we can pre-train the AI on the grid
where we can say, hey, let's train from zero
to 50% low growth by 2030.
Let's pre-train from half a gig
to 20 gigawatts of data centers.
Let's pre-train from zero
to 100% renewable penetration by 2040.
So we can bring all these scenarios
and prepare the AI for all these complexities.
So when we get into inferencing,
it's actually lightning fast.
We're talking about like sub-second
for an 80, 70, 60 powerful.
We're talking about, in a recent example
with a large utility,
around 15 minutes to generate
about more than 10,000 line comp lines
that can solve all of the,
you know, all of the problems that we have.
System operators region for low growth.
And so we can generate the right solutions
to the problems.
And that's really where the power of AI is.
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Okay, so we've been talking about the planning side,
and there, I think, you know, we painted
a reasonably clear picture of, like, what the past,
looks like, or really the present
in most utilities looks like,
which is a lot of planners running a lot of studies manually
that take a long time and then need to be restudied
and restudied and restudied,
and people understand how at least part of this results
on the bulk power system, long interconnection queues,
and so on, but also on the distribution system,
why it's so hard and slow to get new stuff built.
And then, of course, this new world that you're describing,
wherein all this stuff is essentially automated
and there's a human in the loop,
but you can generate them very quickly.
Let's switch to the operations.
I'm going to paint for you a picture
that I think is what most people imagine
when they think of what utility operations looks like
to a first order,
and then you can tell me what it really looks like.
My guess is that most people think,
first of all, it's mostly automated already,
and second of all, to the extent that it's not automated,
that there are, you know, there's, like,
a bunch of people in a NOC with a bunch of big screens
who are, like, watching the screen light up red
when there's an outage,
and then they have to go dispatch somebody to go solve it.
But generally, the grid is already fairly automated
from an operations standpoint.
What is it actually like today?
I think that's a fair statement.
I think the automation today is there thanks to field automation.
So I think we, traditionally, we have been very concerned
about automation inside the control room,
but the grid itself in a substation, at a generator site,
it's pretty much completely autonomous.
That's why it has been so reliable and so fast,
and it balances itself so well.
And it's too fast for human-in-the-loop control.
So the human-in-the-loop side for operations,
it's really monitoring and responding to the abnormalities.
So it's alarm management.
What happens when things go wrong,
and the operator has to diagnose it.
It's a lot of rules as well.
So there's an operational planning phase.
It's traversing timelines.
So operations typically look at maybe a week ahead,
two weeks ahead to look at switching procedures.
So which lines do I have to take out of service to do planned work?
If we can't do planned work, we cannot upgrade the grid.
And now here's the constraint during that time period.
The grid is getting so congested
that if we do worst-case scenario all the time,
the utilities are beginning to struggle
to find time to take the grid into contingency for planned work.
So if we overload the grid too much,
we can't work on it.
That's a big problem.
And the other is the grid is changing so quickly.
Like our short-term forecasts are no longer predictable.
There's a huge call for,
can we start moving towards probabilistic analysis?
So instead of, hey, here's what I think
the single crystal ball future looks like,
or can we prepare for an ensemble
of potential futures?
And how do we risk adjust?
So risk inform our decisions.
Now, utilities are not there yet,
but that's within today's operational planning timeline,
which is do one-time studies, switch in, that's it.
Then you go into real-time side.
Real-time, there's not much that they do,
but mostly it's around dispatch.
So which crews go where,
preparing for supplies, lock and tag type of deal.
So it's very manual operation.
Work procedure, real things.
So more rules and work coordination
than actually balancing the system
or recovering the system.
And then when things go wrong,
then I think Flizzr can kick in.
So self-healing switching can kick in.
But the control room more or less
is mostly alarm management.
Now there's a flood of alarms
and that's another emerging practice,
which is how can we guide the operator
through the flood of alarms coming in?
I'm jumping forward to the AI world,
but we can learn from the patterns of alarms
to help root cause it.
But today it's very much a bit of ADMS rules
to help see what's important and what's not.
And a lot of like human intuition
that still overwhelms the operator.
And then you have the major event side.
When a big storm comes,
when a wildfire hits,
when there's a winter storm.
And so how do we do like really emergency type of supplies,
dispatch,
et cetera,
to prepare for those storms?
Yeah.
I mean,
just based on your description of it,
it sounds like maybe there is less to be gained
from AI in operations versus in planning.
In other words,
like if it's already more automated today,
setting aside alarm management and extreme events,
maybe there's less of a,
the ceiling is lower for improvement.
Is that true in your mind?
Or is it just that it's different?
I think it is.
It's the complete opposite.
I think the potential is even higher.
And when you align,
like I think today we care so much
about connecting data centers and large loads
and even generators that we put a lot of emphasis
on the business case of planning
because you are increasing,
it's the growth engine.
But before this whole large,
big electrification,
low growth process,
I think the biggest value has been reliability.
And there's a lot more to do with that.
And then workforce efficiency,
workflow efficiency.
So in the operational side,
the role of AI is really to bring
a lot of those system studies in the past.
That's one time ad hoc or episodic or periodic
or reactive or responsive
to customer interconnection request
into a continuous real-time analysis engine.
So what is the true like autopilot?
What is the true co-pilot?
I would expect that from a car,
of course, a plane and a spaceship,
but can I now expect that from,
The grid, can the grid study
read the roads, analyze scenarios, assess risks all the time.
And then that's one layer.
The first layer, the foundational layer,
would be the grid analysis and simulation intelligence layer.
But the layer on top is there's so much to be gained
by having AI learn how the human processes can be improved,
how dispatch can be improved,
how alarm management can be improved.
And at the tail end, which we're seeing a lot these days,
is can we learn from each day's events?
Currently, there is no closed-loop feedback
until you have a post-model.
You have an event that drives an investigation
that needs to be reported back up to FERC.
It takes a year to do or something anyway.
And the records are not good.
They're not reconciled.
They have many sources of truth.
None of the recordings,
from SCADA or PMUs or work orders,
they never really paint the common picture.
You can't reconcile the history of events
from these disparate records,
but that's where AI can really come in as well
to reconstruct the daily events, to replay it,
and to start putting a closed-loop continuous improvement loop
on how can we execute better, dispatch better,
and even plan better.
How much is that cable actually,
being utilized historically?
Nobody can really tell you that answer today
in planning more operations,
especially in distribution.
And so I think if we can drive that level
of closed-loop analytics each day,
I think it's going to be a huge game changer.
I think you allude to this,
but one thing I've always wondered
is the degree to which the planning side
or the studies that occur on the planning side
and the operations side are talking to each other.
As an example,
let's say you did a study,
a distribution study, let's just say,
and that study, and as you said,
that study is planning for,
okay, what happens in kind of a worst-case scenario?
Well, the worst-case scenario,
let's say the study says,
okay, the worst-case scenario is it's a hot day
and X, Y, and Z happens,
and there's a possibility we're going to overload this feeder
or something like that,
and then we'll have an outage as a result of that.
That occurs in the study phase today,
but does that,
that then feed anything into the actual operations phase, right?
Because what you would imagine is that in operations then,
what should happen is that the grid should basically
be looking out for that scenario
because somebody else inside the utility studied
and determined that that's the scenario
you need to watch out for.
Does that happen historically?
Of course, each utility might be different,
but that is a very, very rare scenario
that these study assumptions and results
actually feed into operations
because they're measured by this different,
results and KPIs and all that kind of stuff.
So really, this seems,
what happens is it seems at best,
I would say,
is a set of Excel spreadsheets, as always,
that captures the results of the planning study
and then the operational planning,
like a week, two-week-ahead planning,
would use those as fixed criteria
to inform their models.
So these silos between planning and operations
is not just between these two gigantic,
which I would call the heart of the utility,
which is not just connecting people
and customer service and all that,
but it's really maintaining the capacity,
adequacy, resiliency of the grid,
reliability of the grid.
But even planning, as I mentioned,
there's like three, four different timeframes
that they should look at.
There's the long-term planning,
like 25 to 40-year-ahead planning.
There's the medium-term time,
which is great for generation planning,
bulk power integrated planning.
Then there is the medium-term,
which is like five to seven,
sometimes up to 10 years
for like transmission expansions, right?
Because even buying transformers would take that long.
And then there is like short-term planning,
which is anywhere from, I would say,
months ahead to two years, three years ahead,
which has been traditionally
what the key for distribution planning
and somewhat interconnections as well.
So each time you have the seams,
they don't really connect.
The forecast don't connect.
The decisions don't really connect.
And so. And I will say the key point
is not really just blaming it on people in the process,
but you don't even have an analytical platform
that can consume all these different timeframes
and try to piece them together in a coherent timeline.
It will sort of overwhelm any traditional software engine.
And so in some ways,
I would say the utilities are actually adapting
their people and processes
around the limit.
And I think that's one of the limitations
of the analytics intelligence
and decision-making frameworks that they have.
So I think that has to be addressed.
All right, Josh.
The last question I want to ask you
is a little different.
And it's like a hot topic at the moment,
hotly debated,
on which I think you'll have an opinion,
even if it's not exactly in your wheelhouse
or what you're doing at ThinkLabs,
which is there are tens of gigawatts of data centers now
that are being planned with behind-the-meter generation.
And increasingly,
because of challenges in grid connection
and all the moratoria and stuff like that,
that behind-the-meter generation
is acting as a bridge to a long-term interconnect.
And so these are essentially,
they're operating these massive microgrids
or they're planning to operate
these massive microgrids, right?
And it's comprised usually of some kind of gas generation
or a fuel cell, maybe.
There's a UPS, maybe there's a battery,
but that's basically it.
But they're really, they're operating a microgrid, right?
And we've been talking about all of the complexities
of operating the macrogrid.
And I wonder, you know,
the debate that I think is raging right now is like,
is that harder than it seems, basically?
Is it going to be operationally very difficult
to run one of these very large loads
that probably doesn't,
that has like a spiky load profile
off of this gigantic microgrid?
From what you know about operations of a macrogrid,
do you think it's going to be easy or hard?
I mean, or, you know, what's the nuance here?
Well, it's a bit of both.
But I think we were building microgrids
on the distribution side since the,
well, 90s and 2000s, right?
We understand that they can add
a lot of bit of local resiliency,
but let's remember why we have a grid in the first place,
which is so that we don't become individual islands.
And individual islands are always more expensive
than sharing the resources that we have.
And so, yeah, I think they can use it to protect themselves
and to advance their time, speed to power,
their own capacity requirements, et cetera.
But it's not going to sort of serve the greater good
by sharing, having centralized generators
planned appropriately and serving a variety.
So it is really being an island.
So technically, I think good thing is,
yes, you can mitigate some
of the immediate capacity constraints,
but I think there are,
there are existing latent capacity.
So let me just make a statement here,
which is, I believe the grid has enough
existing latent capacity to connect the majority,
if not all of the data centers today.
We just need to find where they are
and improve the overall processes of planning
and operations for the utility.
So if we are to build all these generators behind the meter,
why not just use those to really upgrade
the infrastructure itself to plan better,
to operate better.
But in the meantime,
while the utility is modernizing,
yes, generators can connect faster
if it's a hard capacity
that they don't have on that location,
that the grid doesn't have in the location.
But bringing these additional generators
and batteries and fuel cells, et cetera,
will complex the other side of the equation,
which are the non-steady states.
All your transients, all your EMT,
like electromagnetic transients,
will get way more complicated
with all these behind-the-meter resources.
So is it really good or bad?
Yeah, you might alleviate some constraints,
but you might create new ones.
So it's not that easy of an answer.
And those studies, I would say,
would bog down the utility even more.
Maybe one last opinion on the whole data center
and microgrid side is,
I really believe that, of course,
data centers are driving economic growth, et cetera,
for both the data center and the utility
and hopefully the community.
But that scale,
you're basically building new cities and towns.
And so in that case,
I really think these data centers should be seen as,
I would say, rather than microgrids,
I would rather say micro-utilities.
They have a responsibility
and they have a capability
to reinforce the grid
and benefit all those people around them.
So can we have similar updated,
modern planning and operational processes
around these data centers
as a micro-utility?
And not just as a singular customer.
All right, Josh.
It took too long to have you on,
but glad we did it.
Thank you for the time.
No, thank you.
Thank you.
Josh Wong is the CEO and founder of ThinkLabs.
This show is a production of Latitude Media.
You can head over to latitudemedia.com
for links to today's topics.
This episode is produced by Max Savage-Levinson.
Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand.
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Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Utility planning currently relies on outdated, siloed studies that take months, suffer from poor data quality, and operate on worst-case scenarios, leading to overbuilds and inefficiencies.
AI, specifically physics-informed machine learning, can automate grid planning by simulating power flows, identifying congestion, and generating accurate, deterministic solutions in minutes instead of months.
Utilities can train proprietary, small-scale AI models at low cost (under $5 per run) to achieve over 99.9% accuracy in power flow analysis while enabling hyper-parallel processing and rapid scenario testing.
AI enables not just problem detection but also solution generation—pre-training on scenarios like renewable penetration or data center growth allows real-time, scalable, and risk-informed decision-making.
Operations are already partially automated, but lack real-time, continuous analysis and closed-loop learning; AI can improve alarm management, dispatch efficiency, and post-event incident reconstruction.
Planning and operations remain deeply siloed, with no unified analytical platform to integrate long-term forecasts, short-term plans, and real-time events into coherent decision-making.
Behind-the-meter data center microgrids offer short-term grid relief but complicate grid dynamics through transients and non-steady states, potentially creating new operational challenges.
Data centers should be reimagined as "micro-utilities" with shared responsibility and modern planning/operations practices to strengthen the grid rather than operate as isolated islands.
Summary:
The energy transition is accelerating, and utilities are facing unprecedented complexity in both planning and operations. Current practices are hampered by siloed, manual, and reactive planning—where studies take months, data quality is poor, and worst-case scenarios dominate—leading to overbuilt infrastructure and inefficiencies. AI, particularly physics-informed machine learning, offers a transformative solution by enabling real-time, accurate, and deterministic grid simulations.
These models can be trained at low cost on each utility’s proprietary data, delivering results in minutes instead of months, and can generate optimized solutions for scenarios like renewable integration or data center load growth. In operations, AI improves alarm management, dispatch efficiency, and post-event analysis by creating closed-loop learning from daily events—something absent in current systems. Despite automation, the gap between planning and operations remains wide due to data fragmentation and lack of integration across timeframes.
While behind-the-meter data center microgrids provide short-term capacity relief, they introduce operational complexity and instability. A more sustainable path is to treat data centers as "micro-utilities" with shared responsibilities and modern grid practices, ensuring they contribute to overall grid resilience rather than acting as isolated islands. This shift—driven by AI and a more integrated, data-driven approach—will redefine how utilities plan, operate, and respond in the evolving energy era.
FAQs
Utility planning is currently hampered by siloed departments, poor data quality, manual processes, and reliance on worst-case scenario analysis. Studies often take months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and rely on trial-and-error solutions with limited scalability.
AI can automate and accelerate planning studies by analyzing real-time grid physics, simulating thousands of scenarios, and generating accurate, deterministic solutions. This reduces study times from months to minutes and enables hyper-parallel processing.
It means training AI models on the fundamental laws of power flow, voltage behavior, and grid dynamics so the AI understands how electricity moves through the system, ensuring results are accurate, reliable, and grounded in physical reality.
AI improves operations by enabling real-time grid analysis, reducing alarm management burdens, enhancing risk assessment with probabilistic forecasting, and creating closed-loop learning from daily events to drive continuous improvement.
No, planning and operations remain largely disconnected. Study results are often stored in isolated spreadsheets and not integrated into operational planning, leading to misaligned decisions and fragmented decision-making across timeframes.
Data centers are driving demand for flexible energy and are increasingly using behind-the-meter generation to manage their energy needs, acting as potential microgrids that can help alleviate grid constraints but also add complexity.
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