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 will discuss the realities of managing large load growth from data centers, and how they are finding flexible solutions to accelerating the integration of new large loads in their “hot” states. This includes the need for new tariffs and approaches to load management that maintain reliability and ensure 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 they 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. The result is a more grounded view of achievable DR and load growth in this evolving grid segment. We’ll also examine why utility, regulatory, and legislative endeavors to require flexibility will, or will not, work in practice.

Hear from NASEO and NARUC representatives who will outline the data center and large-load challenges from their regulatory perspective, dive into critical areas of need, and provide insights into what changes they believe may be on the horizon.

Given backlogged interconnection queues, plus increasing scrutiny of emissions and the societal cost of electricity demand, data centers are looking for novel ways to increase their “speed to power” without causing undue burden on the grid, rate payers, or the environment.

Join us to hear from AWS, the US’s largest hyperscaler. AWS will present its progress and learnings to date on how it has leveraged VPP frameworks to accelerate the energization of data centers in areas that otherwise lack the complete amount of requested MW 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. We’ll dive deep into technical and policy challenges, innovative solutions, and plans for the future.

In this discussion, we’ll explore the ways solution providers are exploring load flexibility as it applies to data centers, as well as their pain points to ahieving an energized, flexible future.

Join our utilities presenters as they reconvene at the end of the Data Center Xchange to answer rapid-fire questions about their perspectives on what makes for an an ideal future state in this new energy environment.