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

Load growth for electricity has been very flat, in some cases declining depending on where you were located.

And that was a combination of a number of things.

Some of it was the offshoring of industry.

Some of it is a continuation of energy efficiency programs that, you know, every new HVAC system that comes off the line is more efficient than the last.

So you take an old one off and you put a new one on, it uses less energy.

All those things together kind of flattened out load growth for the utilities.

That flattening started pretty steadily back in the 90s.

So it's been a while.

Now, if you look at different components of load growth, and we've charted out over the years data centers, and you can clearly see changes in data centers from where we started with enterprise and some of the things that were going on.

Yeah.

You can see in the growth when the social media trend started, but then you also see a flattening out there.

And now you're seeing a steady upturn with data centers because of the growth of AI.

But that's not the only growth, as you well know, for data centers.

The other types of data centers that have been around longer than the AI data centers or AI factories are still growing too.

All those businesses are growing.

Then we reach a combination of factors, right?

So a couple of things are going on and I'll compare two things that are very different.

One is the large point loads that are represented by data centers where you get this very large customer that's locating in one spot and they need a lot of power and they need it in a hurry.

And that's one form of growth.

Another that is a challenge for the industry that looked to be a bigger challenge before the data center boom came along was electric transportation.

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