The making of a 24/7 clean grid

A few years ago, 24/7 clean energy became a rallying call in the tech industry. Today, though, as load growth takes off for the first time in decades, it’s a challenge for these companies to procure enough energy — much less clean energy at every hour of every day. 

But for many, 24/7 clean energy is still a central goal. On a gray, windy morning that opened New York Climate Week, a crowd of grid wonks flocked to an office high above Union Square to tackle how, practically speaking, to achieve it.

The thrust of the group’s conclusion: around-the-clock clean energy will require solving several data challenges.

The first step is, of course, abundant renewables. Tech companies are leading corporate purchases of solar and wind, but gigawatts of potential new supply are languishing in interconnection queues. Taking advantage of existing renewable capacity will also require demand-side flexibility — which in turn requires data management.

James McGinniss, CEO and co-founder of David Energy, a software company that coordinates smart energy devices, said that load growth is actually beneficial, because it will encourage more creative grid management. 

“A lot of people are talking about [load growth] as a problem. It's actually a great thing, ultimately,” he said. “There's not enough grid; they can’t interconnect; there’s not enough supply; what have you. They're going to solve the problem on their own. And a lot of that is happening behind the meter.” 

But accessing the utility data that those companies need is one of the biggest pain points in the industry. Kiran Bhatraju, CEO of the global utility data and community solar platform Arcadia, said that the company is increasingly eager for consumption data that they can use to mitigate both costs and emissions throughout the day.

Not only is there no standardization in how utilities present their data — “every utility is a special snowflake,” said Bhatraju — but also the vast majority are reluctant to share information that would make smoothing a customer’s load profile easier. 

“Utilities have little to no incentive to unlock data,” Bhatraju said. “They have [the data]. They have meters. They have no incentive.” 

That has left a gap in the market that Arcadia is trying to fill, creating what it calls “synthetic utility data” by triangulating with both customer meters (some two and a half million of them from residential and commercial customers) and third-party sources in order to estimate a given building’s load profile, among many other things.

“You can’t know how to install solar, storage, lighting, manage efficiency, do demand response without consumption data,” Bhatraju added.

But demand-side flexibility isn’t the only goal. In order to skirt the interconnection queue and persistent permitting delays, renewables developers are looking to locate the best possible locations for their projects. And in a dream world, they would have access to capacity information for the whole country. 

James McWalter is the co-founder and CEO of Paces, an artificial intelligence-fueled geographic information system and data platform that aims to help developers pick the right sites. The big real estate developers who work for hyperscalers, McWalter said, “literally have teams of 20 to 30 people just making phone calls to utilities and asking, point of interconnection, substation by substation…’is there capacity here?’ There is no load queue.”

This wasn’t always the case. Before the September 11th terrorist attacks, McWalter said, there was a transmission capacity map at least for PJM that could be used to see where capacity was; it was ultimately shuttered for cybersecurity reasons.

That said, he added, in some respects we are moving in the right direction: “Data is moving from ‘impossible’ to ‘hard’ to get.” 

Darren Tan, CEO of the sodium-ion battery company Unigrid, said that expanding storage — especially safer-than-lithium chemistries that can be set up in more places — will itself bring us closer to 24/7 clean energy, in part by giving us more data. 

With more ubiquitous storage, he said, “we have a lot more options to play with data. We can trade electricity when there's enough infrastructure in place. It becomes almost like an energy cloud, like how data has evolved over the last few decades.”

While we work toward ubiquitous storage and solar, though, companies are pursuing other options for clean, firm power. 

Microsoft, of course, made headlines last week with its announcement of a $16-billion plan to restart a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island. Meanwhile, Google has put its stake in geothermal with a first-of-its-kind geothermal project in partnership with Fervo Energy.

But at least according to those who are immersed in distributed energy every day, there is some skepticism that these firm resources are a panacea. Through a combination of mainly solar and storage, McGinniss said, parts of the U.S. are already well on their way to reaching 24/7 clean energy.

"The future's here," he said. "It's not evenly distributed."