Energy utilities across the US are seeing a huge demand for data center connection requests.
During a series of Q2 2024 quarterly earnings calls, utility firms Oncor, Xcel, and Ameren explicitly named data centers as a major source of new capacity demands, totaling gigawatts of energy across Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, and Missouri.
Oncor sees 59GW of data center connection requests
First reported by UtilityDive, Oncor said it saw more than 50GW of data center connection requests over the last three months.
During the company’s Q2 2024 earnings call, Oncor CEO Allen Nye said the company saw new interconnection requests for the quarter total 98GW.
Large load customers totaled around 80GW of that, of which around 59GW would come from potential data centers.
Owned by Sempra, Oncor Electric Delivery Company is the largest transmission and distribution electric utility in Texas. Its service area includes Dallas Fort Worth, one of the country’s major data center markets.
Xcel Energy: 6.7GW of data center demand
UtilityDive also noted that utility Excel Energy has a multi-gigawatt pipeline of data center connections in its future.
During its Q22 2024 earnings call, CEO Bob Frenzel said the company has a pipeline of data center requests totaling 6,700MW by 2030. He said the utility was seeing data center loads in Minnesota and Colorado.
“When we speak with hyperscalers and other data center developers, we have what they're looking for low-cost clean energy, access to fiber access to water and other infrastructure, human capital, land that makes us attractive,” said Frenzel. “Right now, we're seeing most of [the] opportunities materialize in the Minnesota and Colorado footprint, but our deeper backlog, I would say, is across all of our service territories in all of our states.”
Customers named by Xcel include QTS and Meta.
When it comes to meeting that demand, Frenzel said: “We don't have 6,000 megawatts of capacity available today. We have some, but we would need to, as part of our existing RFPs and resource plans, add more generation to the stack.”
He continued: “So we will need generation over time. But I think we have plans and processes that are in place that allow us to speed the market to address the needs that our new customers might need today, as well as the growth that they forecast through the end of the decade.”
Minnesota-based Xcel Energy serves eight states: Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and New Mexico. It has previously worked to sell land near its existing power stations to several hyperscalers, including Microsoft.
Ameren signs 250MW data center deal
In Missouri, local utility Ameren signed a deal with a 250MW data center, and has said there was potentially gigawatts of data center opportunity in its pipeline.
As reported by Reuters, during the company’s earning call this month, Ameren CEO Martin J. Lyons said a construction agreement had been executed for a 250MW data center, which would represent an approximate 40 percent and 5 percent annualized increase to Ameren Missouri's industrial megawatt-hour sales and total megawatt-hour sales, respectively, upon completion and full ramp up.
Details on the developer or location of the data center weren't shared.
“Our construction to extend transmission and distribution services to support this data center is expected to be completed in December of 2025, with the customer ramping up operations from 2026 through 2028,” Lyons added. “In addition, we've received expansion commitments or executed new contracts for over 85MW of additional load from manufacturing, smaller data centers, and other industries across both states. We would expect these new and expanding customers to be fully ramped up by 2028 with sufficient generation to serve them, creating value for all customers over time.”
Lyons said Ameren is seeing “gigawatts” of potential opportunity in its future pipeline, with a large portion coming from data centers.
St. Louis-based Ameren is a utility covering Missouri and parts of Illinois. It has previously installed a 500kW cryptomine data center at the Sioux Energy Center coal-fired power plant in Missouri.
Utilities are seeing huge spikes in energy demands from data center customers. AEP has previously said it will have 15GW of data center loads coming online by 2040, while NextEra has 4GW of data center load in its pipeline. PG&E has said more than 3.5GW of data center capacity is due to come online in California over the next five years.
Dominion expects to connect 15 more data centers to the grid in Virginia over the course of 2024, after connecting 15 facilities last year totaling almost a gigawatt of capacity. The utility has connected 94 data centers with more than 4GW of capacity in Northern Virginia since 2019; this includes 15 data centers totaling 933MW in 2023.