Environmental Advisory Board Meeting

five o'clock I'm going to go ahead and call to order the September 8th data center subcommittee meeting of the environmental advisory board Welcome Welcome everybody and with that I will hand it over to Bruce for introduction. Good evening subcommittee members Uh today was second meeting meeting in September We're going to talk more about environmental impact especially that for data centers and other indust heavy industrial uses We have two special speakers for you today Um the first presenter uh this is going to be a little different than what's on your agenda I apologize I arranged the slides slightly different Uh your first presenter will be Dr Noah Kitner He's with the University of North North Carolina And the second speaker Dr Sarra um Anu Chalam from the University of North Carolina as well So just a little background about Dr Kitner um his studies energy systems at multiple scales from regional to inter uh international power grids to community micro grids Uh his receives energy systems planning in in different areas battery assessment and electric vehicles and energy storage as well He'll be coming up to speak to you today about energy systems sustainability and human health topics topics related to data centers So Dr Peter if you don't mind coming up Go Thank you. Yeah Okay Thank you very much uh for having me and inviting me to speak with you today about on-site and grid connected energy for for data centers Um Um as as mentioned um I'm a associate professor in in mental sciences and engineering at UNC Chapel Hill Hill and I'm also uh director of the energy transition initiative in UNCC's Institute for the Environment Uh so my research focuses focuses on energy systems particularly looking at battery storage systems and other uh uh uh technologies that are needed to

uh trans transition the grid toward uh cleaner and more uh healthier alternatives So I've been asked to talk a bit about on-site generation and different different electricity options for data centers Uh Uh so uh today I'll go through uh a little about the energy system What's happening in terms of energy demand and load load growth Then I'll talk more about uh grid impacts and why why uh data center operators are more likely to seek on-site generation than other uh types of and then we'll think about u sustainability considerations So So this is actually a very broad macro scale view of the whole United States energy system uh from 2024 from Lawrence Liverour National Labs uh view of the energy system and what you can see is that on the left side you have all the different different uh primary sources of energy for the US In the middle you have uh electricity generation and it's broken down down and it's broken down into into different sectors going from residential to uh commercial industrial and transportation sector uh and it's all proportionally allocated So one thing you might notice is about about 2/3 of the energy in the US energy system is rejected energy in the form of of waste heat um and that energy is lost uh through the system You also have um um about

32 quadrillion BTUs So everything is in uh quads of uh uh electricity generation Part of the challenge uh in a lot of sectors is that there's a lot of pressure pressure to increase electricity generation from different sources and use that in in different sectors Uh so uh some data centers depending on how they may be classified could be industrial or uh commercial commercial loads and uh you can see that electricity feeds a lot of that uh energy There's also natural gas and petroleum used for heating So this is a very macro scale view but I think it's important because it informs how uh data centers are thinking about where uh energy will come from and it shows that there may be some constraints uh related to where um electricity is is coming coming from So uh we've seen that advances in artificial intelligence in particular has led to massive computational needs and and uh uh created uh a lot of uh forecasts to show that uh the US is about to enter a period of of time where where the demand for energy is rising in after the past uh 10 years or so where it hasn't um been growing as as much Uh this may require new planning and and regulatory frameworks to think about about uh aspects of reliable electricity So everyone wants reliable electricity uh for their homes and businesses And so so uh in order to maintain a reliable grid now there's new pressures not just from increasing demand but also uh climate change

and and weather events and other issues that are uh affecting the uh frequency of of power outages outages and uh on the grid So um that's where uh different data set are looking toward toward uh solutions to get get electricity and that's um where they're looking at potentially colllocating generation on site or providing some grid services like flexibility Um I'll explain more about what I mean by grid flexibility but those are not not really well understood by research in terms of how they'll affect affect uh the electric grid and rate payers since it's a quite a complex uh system system and uh there's not not much experience um but there have been several studies to look at where electricity consumption at a national scale is going based on um new data centers and under different forecast scenarios um there are predictions that it's going to drive most of the demand growth uh more than potentially more than 50% of new growth through the next uh 5 years through 2030 And uh that's much faster more than twice the rate rate of the past decade So this is um very fast growth and um grid buildout buildout is much slower than data center development So uh there's kind of a confluence of issues related to the data centers that are being uh proposed because because a lot of them need a lot of electricity and other energy services to be able to operate But um

the developers are uh uh not necessarily in in line with all of the utilities because there's a lot of different uh demands on the grid right now And so so uh some of the issues that have created bottlenecks uh for using electricity on the grid include interconnection cues that that are pretty long So you have to wait a long time to be able to actually connect your uh generator uh to the grid or get permission to uh connect your your large load to the grid which requires some period of study for reliability and other environmental issues There's also uh some supply chain issues and different equipment equipment and uh permitting delays are already there So with all of those background issues issues happening in the energy sector as data centers are looking at building new generation generation they're encountering a lot of challenges around the uh around the country and in North Carolina too in terms of being able to figure out how they're going to get power That's led a lot of data centers to pursue looking at uh what are the on-site generation generation options available especially because the cost of distributed energy resources has declined and also there's an availability of other options for them uh in terms of uh uh diesel generators and uh and natural gas turbines which I'll I'll talk about some of those uh issues So with with a lot of limited capacity in the electric grid the uh utilities reser planning reserve margins are are decreasing It's uh threatening the reliability of the the grid and increasing some costs to operate the

grid With all those factors in in mind someone who's operating a data center might want reliable electricity and so they're looking at what can they do to supplement their their own energy demands uh to add this generation So these are some of the reasons why I think that uh data centers in particular are adding so much much electricity generation and other other uh backup energy resources on site either for um heating or cooling There's also I think it's it's important to distinguish between different types of data centers because data centers get get um classified differently and uh some of the really