Analyzing Data Center Flexibility to Meet Growing Power Demands

Analyzing Data Center Flexibility to Meet Growing Power Demands

From GridPulse, a Grid Forward podcast by gridforward

August 25, 2025 · 39 min · Episode 68

About this episode

The episode discusses the increasing power demands of data centers and explores flexibility solutions with industry experts.

Power demand from data centers is clearly increasing faster than current electric infrastructure and markets can accommodate. Therefore, data centers and grid operators are exploring one workaround: flexing data center loads during peak demand times. Brian Janous, of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, and Chris Pennington, of Iron Mountain Data Centers, discuss the current opportunities and challenges to data center flexibility. For example, there are options for moving workloads among facilities and leveraging the improving capabilities of battery storage. On the other hand, demand response is not a major business driver. The industry needs to define relatively simple solutions that can be deployed at scale to meet market demand.

People in this episode

Guests: Brian Janous, Chris Pennington

Topics covered

  • data centers
  • power demand
  • grid flexibility
  • battery storage
  • demand response

Keywords

  • electric infrastructure
  • workload management
  • market demand

Mentioned in this episode

Products: battery storage

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