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Data Center World 2025

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Local Power Sourcing: The Promise of Microgrids with Small Modular Reactors

James Reilly  (Principal Consultant, Reilly Associates)

Michael Stadler  (CTO, Xendee Corporation)

Timothy Grunloh  (Principal Scientist, University of Illinois)

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Track: Power Sourcing & Sustainability

Session Type: Session

Vault Recording: TBD

Audience Level: All Audiences

This panel will address will address local power supply challenges for data centers due to both power resource adequacy and transmission constraints in the grid, based on regional grid planning sources. Solutions for providing grid and off-grid power to data centers as microgrids will be shared. Also featured will be a case study on SMR for Data Centers as microgrids using actual cost and performance data from a supercomputer facility, with a scenario for power from a micro-reactor integrated with renewables and storage.

Panelists will give details from a scoping study modeling and analyzing the National Petascale Computing Facility (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign). This study begins with baseline scenarios that include electricity, evaporative cooling and cold storage for data centers, and continues with integrating generation resources from renewable energy, battery energy storage systems, low emission generators and CHP absorption chiller models). Solutions for on-site power supply from micro-reactors/SMR for both power and heat applications via microgrids and virtual power plants will be described, along with grid interconnection.

The overriding theme is 24/7, dispatchable, and reliable power supply for data centers.

Takeaway

  • What's different: Solutions for power supply will be articulated based on a scoping study published in March 2025. This is the first scoping study on microgrids and data centers that addresses both existing solutions, using conventional generation and solutions on the horizon
  • Why is this technology so important today? The demand is greater than the supply. We will talk about a solution based on real data for data centers and local power supply
  • ROI: The presentation will include scenarios where power supplies specifically designed to serve data centers can be profitable, by participation in markets for capacity and grid services
  • Advice for overcoming challenges: Multiple scenarios will be presented for solutions to power supply based on microgrid and virtual power plant concepts and planning tools. These will be framed in the context of technology developments for generation resources and evolving market structure for the integration of distributed energy resources to the power delivery system