The AI boom has driven a massive surge in energy demand across the country. Critics argue this influx of connections is stressing America’s aging grid infrastructure. There is concern that, in the short term, the energy crunch could cause bills to rise, while in the long term it may lead to outages or other technical problems.
At TechCrunch Disrupt earlier this month, industry insiders tempered much of this criticism with optimism about how the flood of new energy connections could actually open the door for grid modernisation. Apoorv Bhargava, founder and CEO of WeaveGrid, Tim Heidel, CEO of Veir, and Kristin Eberhard, VP of policy at Rewiring America, said that though the grid faces new challenges, there are also plenty of new opportunities.
“It’s a very different electric grid, right?” said Bhargava. “We’re dealing with a ton of new variables, including renewable energy. We’re dealing with a ton of new load in the form of electric vehicles and data centers and heat pumps, and the ability to manage and orchestrate is fundamentally what utilities are now grappling with.”
While all of those new connections are driving an ever larger amount of stress to the grid, Bhargava’s company hopes to provide the kind of load orchestration and management that helps utilities maximise the potential of the current system. WeaveGrid’s software can help organisations efficiently deploy energy while also optimising connections to reduce utility payers’ bills, the founder said.
Heidel, on the other hand, runs a company that is working to build out and expand the physical infrastructure of the grid, while also making it run much more efficiently. Veir sells superconductive power lines that promises to transfer energy at a much more efficient rate than traditional ones. Veir’s cables can carry power five times further than traditional cables while also requiring 20 times less space, the company has said. Earlier this month the startup raised $110 million in a Series C funding round.
“The scale of the investment in AI infrastructure is driving a tremendous amount of innovation,” said Heidel. “There’s a ton of new technologies that are coming off the shelves and starting to get to scale that, pulled together, can actually really make sure that data centers are the best community neighbors and citizens be right.”
He added: “I think that we really need to look at ways that we can really adopt all of that as fast as possible to ease this next stage of growth.”
Eberhard, whose organisation advocates for household electrification, also said that while the surge in data center energy demand has spurred a new urgency to the modernisation cause, it has also created an environment where industries are ready to try new things.
“I feel like this era of AI and load growth is a very improv era,” Eberhard said. “There’s a lot of yes-and-ing going on. So yes, we need more transmission lines. Yes, we need more centralized power plants, and we also need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of all this other stuff that we had previously been leaving on the table when we didn’t have this urgency of the AI demand.”
What it means
The pressure to upgrade the grid is forcing companies to move faster with new hardware and software. Utilities now have the chance to test technologies that might have taken years to justify before. For the people making things, this means more reliable power and potentially lower bills, but it also means the industry is shifting away from old methods toward solutions that can handle the new load.
