Doctoral candidate Tyler Norris returned as a guest on the Catalyst podcast, discussing how electric load flexibility can help power the AI-focused data center boom. 

US power demand has soared in recent years with growing artificial intelligence, construction, and electrification needs. The Bloomberg Energy Daily cites new Nicholas Institute research saying the US can meet this rising consumption and quickly add huge loads to its grids without building new power plants by deploying grid flexibility—strategically cutting consumption by the equivalent of about one day a year’s usage.

Jigar Shah, former director of the DOE Loan Programs Office and longtime clean energy entrepreneur, cited a recent Nicholas Institute analysis on the Open Circuit podcast. Discussing residential solar uptake and its effects on the electrical grid, Shah said: "When you look at Tyler Norris’ paper from Duke University, it says that if you basically solve for 50 hours a year, then you could get way more out of the grid that we’ve already paid for."

During a U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy hearing, Duke University expert Tyler Norris discussed a recent study he coauthored on how to meet rising energy demand in the United States. "Our findings suggest that with modest flexibility from new large electricity customers, the existing U.S. power system can accommodate substantial load additions without compromising reliability," Norris testified, according to POWER magazine.

A new paper from Harvard University argues that the cost of upgrading power systems to provide electricity to data centers will fall to normal people and businesses under traditional utility models, Heatmap News reports. In proposing alternative approaches, the Harvard researchers cite a recent study from Duke University scholars that shows utilities could avoid billions of dollars of system upgrades if data centers commit to powering down for a small portion of every year.

As utilities face a surge in electricity demand, a study by Duke University scholars offers an alternative to costly new generation: Let data centers come online under an agreement that they won’t be able to draw power from the grid when energy use is at its highest levels. “If you’re not putting more stress on some of the existing peaks, you may be able to defer that capacity addition and come online more quickly,” lead author Tyler Norris told The News & Observer.

On March 5, testifying before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommitee on Energy, Tyler Norris cited a recent Nicholas Institute study on how load flexibility could help the existing U.S. power grid meet elevated demand.

During a hearing Wednesday, Tyler Norris, James B. Duke Fellow at Duke University, told the U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy that repealing tax incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act would likely hinder utility providers’ plans to expand nuclear, wind and solar energy sources. “If you pull back incentives for a given activity, you’re going to see less of that activity," Norris said. "In this case, that means there’s going to be less generation out of the system, and it’s going to impose higher costs.”

A recent Duke University study found that electric utilities can already handle demand growth from data centers for most of the year. They just need to shift when those power requests happen during a couple of hours in the year. “If these loads were able to reduce consumption at critical times, then we could accommodate them without triggering the need for this new generation or transmission,” coauthor Dalia Patiño-Echeverri, associate professor at the Duke Nicholas School of the Environment, told WFAE. 

Canary Media reports that if data centers and other big electricity customers limit their power use during peak hours, it could unlock tens of gigawatts of ​“spare” capacity on US grids, citing a recent analysis from Duke University’s Nicholas Institute.