Resilience, clean energy, storage, transmission upgrades and microgrids were top of mind for big tech companies speaking at a recent conference, The Great Transformation: A Data Center and Energy Innovation Summit in Bend, Oregon.
Representatives from Intel, Google and Amazon pointed to the need to meet burgeoning power demand with resilient, clean energy during panels and interviews. They offered solutions such as new transmission technologies that can improve grid capacity.
In addition, an Amazon panelist said the company is staying on track to deploy renewables in spite of the phaseout of the investment tax credit (ITC) for wind and solar under the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” law.
At the conference, microgrid advocates explained how microgrids and other distributed energy resources (DERs) not only provide resilience but can yield a return on investment by participating in utility programs that lower peak demand.
The high cost of outages at Intel
Achieving resilience is a critical goal for Intel, said Rami Khouri, vice president of platform engineering group and general manager of data center hardware engineering at the company. If there’s an outage at a fabrication facility, the company has to recalibrate and reset equipment.
“I would say a one-hour outage costs basically millions of dollars,” Khouri said in an interview. “That’s why we have our own generators as backup. But we need it to be clean; it’s extremely important.”
Google also wants to avoid outages, and its focus is on easing transmission constraints, said Dylan Sullivan, energy market development strategic negotiator at Google. The company last month announced it’s collaborating with CTC Global to accelerate the development of next-generation transmission technology for the U.S. power grid. CTC Global’s high-capacity conductors can quickly boost grid capacity and reliability, he said. Google is working with CTC Global to identify transmission line developers and utilities interested in this technology.
“Selected partners in projects are going to gain access to a powerful combination of resources, including workforce training, cost assistance and technical analysis,” Sullivan said.
20,000 line miles of gross new transmission needed
A report, “Connected West,” from Gridworks found that peak demand will increase by 100 GW by 2045, Sullivan said. The study also found that gross new transmission needed by 2045 to meet increasing power demand is above 20,000 line miles, with only about 25% of that total available from planned upgrades. The report said that reconducting upgrades, co-locating new lines and high-capacity conductors could meet a significant portion of new transmission capacity.
“Our collaboration with CDC Global is not going to solve all those 20,000 miles, but we do think we'll be able to generate the kind of experiences and positive reports that can influence other users,” Sullivan said.
Google announced on July 25 that it’s partnering with energy storage company Energy Dome to provide carbon-free energy to the grids that power the company’s operations.
Amazon to move forward with renewables despite ITC changes
Also top of mind during the conference was the effects of the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” law on renewable energy deployment. During a panel discussion, Nate Hill, head of energy policy at Amazon, was asked how the Big Beautiful Bill law’s phaseout of the ITC for solar and wind would affect the company’s development plans.
“We've made this net-zero commitment by 2040. We have a track record of deploying partnerships with renewable developers for the last 10 years and that was through a lot of different variations of the ITC,” he said. “We all remember, I think, the old days when that used to roll off and then come back.”
Amazon continues to work with partners to deploy wind, solar and energy storage, along with small nuclear reactors in the medium- and long-term, he said.
“I think we're going to be looking at those and how they're impacted, but I think our pipeline is going to go forward with this,” Hill said.
How microgrids provide resilience and yield savings
