The US may have a secret weapon against rising electricity prices. The grid is built to handle “peak demand”, meaning that most of the time it is only running at about half of its capacity. A data center willing to curtail demand a few days a year could be built without needing any new power plants.

https://wapo.st/4av5YE1

by mafco

23 comments

  1. Yea right, the truth is it will be the cities mandated to “curtail demand” a few days a year. Governments will claim that AI is too important to “turn off” and that it is better for regular citizens to just be without power for a weekend here and there.

  3. Strange that they have a large building that would be easy to accommodate solar power. It will not power it all but it sure would help with it’s overall usage. Plus installing battery backup would be a game changer.

  5. Yup we can easily make this work. Also, we may realize that AI can be throttled because the demand isn’t there

  6. Yes! I’m sure those energy companies WILL lower prices as demand increases. They will do it for the people of America, hands on their hearts, standing tall behind the American flag and an American eagle upon their shoulder.

    Yep, this is what will happen. They won’t raise prices as demand surges.

  7. It is a well researched article. Different data centers are different. The big new load is AI training. That can be checkpointed, stop, then resume later. We can design data centers better for load flexibility. Data centers use energy for compute – AI processors, CPU, GPU and networking. And the data centers use energy for cooling. So to reduce load, you can shut down compute, but then you have to cool the electronics which takes time. Liquid cooling would be a big improvement.

    Crypto can stop and start, but the business is so competitive, they hate to do it. ERCOT pays huge rebates to crypto for reducing load which is reflected in residential rates.

    Your run of the mill cloud provider will have a mix of processes which can be priced based on real time energy prices. With that pricing, some customers can schedule accordingly. If you have to run your payroll or inventory on a certain schedule, you will run it. Over a 24 hour period, the high load hours will usually be under 6. Your higher priced hours in a year might be under 500 out of 8760.

    The AI data center bubble is very high risk. But in the end, AI is going to need to charge customers. Google and Microsoft have revenue models now, OpenAI XAI and others do not.

    [https://archive.ph/20251227123409/https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/12/25/electricity-grid-usage-data-centers/](https://archive.ph/20251227123409/https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2025/12/25/electricity-grid-usage-data-centers/)

  8. ERCOT has in place agreements with data centers to dramatically reduce their demand for electricity during peak times or emergency situations such as freak snowstorms.

    Graph of Net Load over Time: [https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/](https://blog.gridstatus.io/net-load-ramps/)

    Article about how data centers need their own data storage if they’re to have electricity during emergency events: [https://resources.convergentep.com/ercots-growing-load-what-texas-data-centers-need-to-know-about-energy-storage](https://resources.convergentep.com/ercots-growing-load-what-texas-data-centers-need-to-know-about-energy-storage)

  9. This is called Demand Response and has existed for many years now. Business customers get paid for the ability to curtail their demand during peak hours. However, the key word here is “paid”, which will not allow residential rates to go down.

  11. This *secret weapon* thing is what we call “découvrir l’eau chaude” in France. Load management is network management 101.

  12. Before you know people will be prevented from chafing their EVs to free up capacity for data centers

  13. Demonstrate your plan to power the datacenter with your own resources, not the overtaxed grid. No fossil fuels, do it with renewables, and your project is approved.

  14. this is hilarious. theres a good reason why power plants do what they do

  15. Trust me a data center is not going to want to curtail for a few days. So much lost revenue.

  16. Anyone who says “willing” for a datacenter doesn’t really understand what they do.

  17. Isn’t the sales pitch from Span is that the operator can pay you to not charge your EV as fast if a data center needs the capacity?

  18. Data centers cannot shut down during peak days lol that’s not how it works.

    However, this should promote a market for smart energy usage. Like programming energy usage (dishwasher, laundry, HVAC (to a degree), EV charging) to avoid peak hours

  20. “Peak Demand” is 10 times the night time demand.

    A Datacenter is needed during “peak demand” and it will require batteries to ne kapt alive during the day, when it could have used solar emergy.

  22. More likely they would use their bulk-purchase power to demand that consumers be load-shed so they could keep stable operation for their “essential economic benefit”.

  23. China recently built a massive battery for $100/kWh. If cycled 10,000 times that’s 0.01/kWh. It would make more sense to store power during cheap times for use during peak times than to turn off during peak times.

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