The AI boom has caused a massive surge in energy demand across the country. Critics argue this increase is putting a stress test on the aging US grid infrastructure. Concerns exist that this energy crunch could lead to rising costs and potential outages in the future.
“It’s a very different electric grid, right?” said Bhargava. “We’re dealing with a ton of new variables, including renewable energy. We’re dealing with a ton of new load in the form of electric vehicles and data centers and heat pumps, and the ability to manage and orchestrate is fundamentally what utilities are now grappling with.”
While these new connections are increasing stress on the grid, Bhargava's company aims to provide load orchestration and management solutions. Weavegrid's software helps organizations deploy energy efficiently and optimize connections to lower bills for utility customers.
Heidel, who runs a company building and improving grid infrastructure, believes in efficiency. Veir sells superconductive power lines that transfer energy more efficiently than traditional lines. According to the company, Veir's cables carry power five times further while using 20 times less space. The startup recently raised $110 million in a Series C funding round.
“The scale of the investment in AI infrastructure is driving a tremendous amount of innovation,” said Heidel. “There’s a ton of new technologies that are coming off the shelves and starting to get to scale that, pulled together, can actually really make sure that data centers are the best community neighbors and citizens be right.”
He added that rapid adoption of these technologies is necessary to ease the next stage of growth.
Eberhard, who advocates for household electrification, noted that the surge in data center energy demand has created a new urgency for modernization. “I feel like this era of AI and load growth is a very improv era,” Eberhard said. “There’s a lot of yes-and-ing going on. So yes, we need more transmission lines. Yes, we need more centralized power plants, and we also need to make sure that we’re taking advantage of all this other stuff that we had previously been leaving on the table when we didn’t have this urgency of the AI demand.”
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