A new study released yesterday, “Flexible Data Centers: A Faster, More Affordable Path to Power,” is the first publicly available paper to combine real utility transmission system data, system-level capacity expansion modeling, and site-level capacity optimization to evaluate how flexibility can accelerate data center interconnections.

The study was conducted by Camus Energy (led by Astrid Atkinson), Princeton University ZERO Lab (led by Jesse Jenkins), and encoord.

The findings are compelling. Specifically, the study found that combining flexible grid connections with a “bring-your-own-capacity” (BYOC) model in the country’s largest electricity market (PJM) can:

• Protect affordability: Flexible data centers contributed ~$733 million per gigawatt toward the costs associated with their incremental load, reducing net system cost increase by 96% compared to a scenario with the same volume of inflexible data centers.

• Preserve reliability: Grid power remained available for >99% of hours across all modeled data center sites, with on-site resources dispatched only 40-70 hours annually.

• Accelerate interconnection: This approach shortened the wait for grid power by 3 to 5 years compared to traditional timelines.