Transcript
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Latitude Media covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.
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I'm Shayl Khan and this is Catalyst.
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You might slow down a job. You might change the resource allocation of how many chips, for example, are instantaneously being used for a job. You might also go all the way down to the underlying silicon and you might change what we call the clock frequency of the chip to change the rate at which computations happen.
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Coming up what does it actually look like to make a data center flexible?
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Imagine a world where connected devices like EVs, home batteries and smart thermostats work together to support a more efficient, reliable and affordable power grid. EnergyHub is making this vision a reality today with Energy Hub's Edgederms platform. Utilities can create virtual power plants through customer centric flexibility programs, making it easy to manage distributed resources and balance the grid. Unlock grid flexibility and reliability through cross der management with Energy hub, the trusted edgederms leader. Visit energyhub.com to learn more. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner for mission driven organizations developing and adopting climate solutions. Their team of experts help businesses like yours identify, refine and amplify your authentic climate story. With over three decades of experience as a growth partner to the most consequential brands in the industry, their team is ready to make an impact on day one. Get started today@antennagroup.com need to accelerate procurement.
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For an upcoming solar or storage project. ANSA is your best source of intel to stay on top of current policy, tariff, domestic content and supply chain issues. ANSA's team of experts is available to help you adjust procurement strategies, secure safe harbor products and find existing inventory in the US as policy continues to evolve. Learn more about ANSA subscription and service options to help you navigate an uncertain market@go.anzarenewables.com Latitude.
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I'm Shel Khan. Invest in early stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. So the conventional wisdom about data centers is that from an electricity perspective, they look like totally flat loads that is operating 24, 7, 365 and without much willingness to change that. But as power increasingly becomes the choke point for more data center infrastructure development, the world is waking up to a bunch of ways in which that's not entirely or necessarily true. First, you can put generation or batteries on site to shave peak load. That's the physical solution. But there are also digital solutions, it appears. First, because data centers aren't actually operating at nameplate peak most of the time anyway, but also second, because you might actually be able to make the workloads themselves a little bit flexible. Google actually made a big announcement about doing this at their data centers just a few weeks ago. They announced that they've partnered with two utilities, Michigan Power and tva, to introduce demand response via workload flexibility in their data centers. But our guest today is my old friend Varun Sivaram, who's also working on this problem. His company, Emerald AI, is building a software platform that is intended to make data centers flexible. As with many things in electricity, the devil is in the details. And in this case, the details involve what do we mean by flexibility? How do we actually get it? What are the SLAs between the data center operators and their customers? How are the grid operators going to think about it? There are a lot of nuances to this, so let's get into it. Here's Varun. Varun, welcome back Shail.
