40+ ways to plug in a data center

It may not be the most scintillating reading for the general audience, but the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab is out with an extremely cogent, clear rundown of over 40 proposals to speed up how fast large loads – data centers, of course, but also industrial users or fleet EV charging – can connect to power. These range from the frequently-discussed (BYOG, interruptible service) to the arcane (ERIS-like service for loads, one of several proposals to adapt tools from the generation interconnection toolkit to the load side). As usual, the national lab that brought you quantitative evidence that new load doesn’t (necessarily) increase prices is calibrated on how much to panic – they compare load forecasting errors from the 1970s over-forecast to now, and find we might actually be doing better. Worth noting that proposals to speed up construction of the transmission needed to connect many of these loads to electrons – which can take up to three times as long as the planning and study process, in the report’s estimation – are out of scope here.