Electric vehicles (EVs) have been the proving ground for flexible load over the past five years. Utilities, regulators, and solution providers have piloted and scaled managed charging programs, tested time-varying rates, and begun integrating flexibility into planning processes.

At the same time, a new wave of load growth is emerging from large data centers, with individual facilities often exceeding 100 MW and requiring near-perfect reliability.

This session brings these two worlds together to answer a critical question: What lessons from EV flexibility actually translate to large-scale, mission-critical loads like data centers, and where do entirely new approaches need to be developed?

Utilities from Virginia, Texas and western states drive this panel focusing on the realities of the growth of large loads from data centers and how utilities in these ‘hot’ states are finding flexible solutions to the accelerated integration of new large loads. This includes developing new tariffs, and approaches to load management, while maintaining reliability and ensuring retail customer costs are not impacted.

What happens when you interview twenty-five experts including hyperscale data center operators, utility key account and program managers, national researchers, and in-field implementers? They reveal how these facilities actually make decisions about flexibility, operations, and infrastructure, and why many assumptions and current models fall short. Existing studies often overlook critical constraints, including reliability requirements, extreme outage costs, speed-to-market pressures, and the rapid shift from enterprise to hyperscale cloud. To address this gap, the California PUC initiated a cross-sector effort to gather direct insights on real-life cooling, IT operations, power systems, backup generation, and commissioning. This produces a more grounded view of achievable DR and load growth in this fastest-evolving grid segment. The session also examines why utility, regulatory, and legislative endeavors to require flexibility will or will not work in practice.

Hear from representatives from NASEO and NARUC as they define the data center and large load challenges from the regulatory perspective, dive into critical areas and provide insights into what changes we may see in the future as this industry evolves.

Given backlogged interconnection queues and increased scrutiny on emissions and societal electricity cost impacts, data centers are increasingly looking for novel ways to increase their speed to power without causing undue burden on the grid, rate payers, or the environment. In this session, hear directly from AWS, the US’s largest hyperscaler. AWS will explore progress and learnings to date on how they are leveraging VPP frameworks to accelerate energization of data centers in areas that otherwise lack the complete amount of the requested MWs of capacity. Leaving “nothing off the table,” this framework seeks to move beyond FOM-centric or onsite approaches to BYOC, and investigates how residential DERs can be orchestrated in real time to provide firm relief to capacity shortfalls that would otherwise delay or restrict data center expansions. This interactive session will dive deep into technical and policy challenges, innovative solutions, and future forward plans.

Flexibility solutions for data centers. How solution providers are managing and current pain points they are working through to achieve an energized, flexible future.

Utilities reconvene at the end of the Data Center Xchange to answer, rapid-fire, the question of what an ideal future looks like from their perspective.