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Guest: Alex Marshall, Group Business Development and Marketing Director at Clarke Energy.
“I'm Alex Marshall... we are the distributed energy specialist part of REHLKO... focusing on resilient distributed energy solutions.”
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The 3-year grid bottleneck is forcing data center developers to bypass utility queues in favor of immediate on-site generation.
“Every data center being built right now needs power immediately, not when the grid connection finally arrives. That gap has created a market and the technology filling it... is the old school gas engine.”
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Project scales have undergone a massive shift, with 20MW 'unicorn' projects of the past being replaced by 200MW-450MW base load installations.
“Historically for us we were working on 1-2 megawatt projects... Now, a 10, a 20, or a 50 megawatt project was a unicorn project. Now we saw in Ireland we had a 60 megawatt project... now that project is small for us.”
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Gas engines are winning the 'dunkelflaute' battle against batteries, providing the long-duration power needed during extended wind and solar lulls.
“Batteries typically have one to two hour duration output. In the dunkelflaute—the low energy doldrums of the winter—those batteries simply just don't fit that gap and batteries don't generate electricity; they store electricity.”
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The 'Speed to Power' mandate currently outweighs efficiency concerns, with many operators skipping high-efficiency CHP (Combined Heat and Power) systems to get online faster.
“Data centers... they're concerned about speed to power. They're not necessarily concerned at the moment about efficiency. We'll see those customers go through a learning process... but if it's a bridging solution, they are less likely to want to see combined cooling power because of additional capital expenditure.”