David Porter

speaker

325 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 14 Jul

David Porter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Not Your Father’s Data Center · David Porter: From Grid Load to Grid Asset: How Data Centers Can Support the Grid · 14 Jul 2026 podcast

And if you look and this is a broad statistic, Raymond, but if you look at the grid in the United States, there's about 15 percent of the grid capacity that's built for that peak, which is maybe 10 percent of the time in a year.

So if we can more efficiently do things on the grid in total.

We can start to capture some of that excess capacity and put it to work more effectively so it's not sitting around idle 90% of the time.

Exactly.

And it's no different in the grid than the way you plan your scenarios in the data center, too.

The more of that headroom that you have to plan for, those last increments of capability and capacity that you have to bring on are far more expensive.

And all of those that preceded it.

And for the utilities, when they make that investment, and then they're in rate base in some regulated vertically integrated utilities, but if you're in a competitive market and you've built that increment,

to meet those peak times.

And it's just sitting there idle.

As an investor, you're not making money off of that either.

So the better opportunity is to better utilize everything connected to the grid, load and supply side, use it more efficiently.

And again, back to our earlier points, that drives down the overall price for everyone when you can run the assets longer, more efficiently, and more effectively.

There is.

And we could get into some really long-winded engineering discussions here, but I don't want to do that and you don't want to hear it.

The one thing that's really unique about the electric grid is –

It's really, it's a living, breathing system that changes moment by moment because the generation follows the load.

And by that, I mean, and this is what the system operators do.

They are watching 24 by 7, 365 days a year, what the load is at all the different points on their system.

And when they need more load, they dial up more generation or reach out to somebody else in the market and say, hey, we need some more energy.

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