Powering Data: NREL Partner Forum Puts Everything on the Table

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Last Updated on: 12th June 2025, 04:35 am

NREL Announces Chip-to-Grid Consortium, Invites Collab Around Energy-Data Integration

Over the past decade, energy demand from U.S. data centers has tripled—doubling in just the last two years. And the growth is not slowing down.

Utilities are wondering where to add generation. Meanwhile, companies queue for that power. Governments are deciding what to permit, and residents are voicing their priorities. Rarely are they all in the same room, but for a productive two days, more than 300 participants gathered in Golden, Colorado, at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to strategize powering data centers during the 2025 NREL Partner Forum.

For an issue that is fundamentally about connections—connecting data centers to the grid and connecting people to each other—NREL was a natural place to collaborate. In the shadow of full-scale grid assets, and next to an eminently efficient data center that supplies leading artificial intelligence (AI) research, attendees worked through the details of data and power systems.

“That’s the magic of the Partner Forum,” said Andrea Watson, associate laboratory director for Innovation, Partnering, and Outreach at NREL. “We know we can do so much more together than on our own, so we host events like Partner Forum to facilitate better engagement with stakeholders and to develop better solutions for everyone. It’s how we drive NREL’s research impact.”

Yes, More Power. And Different Power.

“We are just getting warmed up,” keynote speaker Dean Nelson said, after showing numbers that prove the recent climb in data center capacity. Nelson’s career followed that same trajectory, and his insight helped frame both the big picture and the finer points.

“We have to do this the right way, to balance the social, economic, ecological, and community preference. Like a Rubik’s Cube,” Nelson said.

He ran through many of the major topics—like flexibility (“data centers must become active grid participants”), siting (“not moving power to data center, but data center to power”), and community approval (“master planning has to be with the communities”)—including one that resurfaced several times later: “Data centers create a giant amount of instantaneous demand.”

“It’s like starting an engine a thousand times in a second,” Nelson remarked. “That’s why NREL is so important: Data centers can stabilize or destabilize the grid, and we have to know how.”

Recent breakthroughs in chip design have packed more power consumption into the same-sized server rack, which means large and fast swings in electrical load. For the grid planners in the room, this was the crux of the problem.

How To Connect Petaflops and Gigawatts

When dealing with loads that are “the equivalent of bringing cities to the grid”—as Mason Emnett, senior vice president of Constellation Energy put it—competitive jostling for new generation might not work anymore.

“What keeps me up at night is infighting over pieces of the pie, even though the pie is big enough,” Emnett said, responding to a panel prompt. “It creates friction in the regulatory space, instead of collaboration.”

Taking the whole-nation view, power transmission exists along certain corridors, as do data centers. If utilities, regulators, companies, and communities can collaborate, perhaps there is enough “pie,” including generation sources such as natural gas, solar and storage, hydrogen fuel, and in the case of Constellation’s planned restart of Three Mile Island, nuclear.

Attendees bounced through many options to bring more power online and to better use the power that already exists.

“There is no silver bullet,” emphasized Prasanna Joshi, vice president of low-carbon solutions technology at ExxonMobil. “We look at all solutions—carbon capture, natural gas generation, hydrogen-powered turbines. But equally important is software: using that chip more efficiently.”

“Why not think about new market structures to incentivize large rotating machines?” asked a panelist from Idaho National Laboratory, in reference to the extra grid services that nuclear and other inertial plants provide but are uncompensated for.

“Systems are in place to unlock grid flexibility, but the markets are not,” another agreed.

“We need some form of battery to support that large on-off ramp of power,” added a panelist from an engineering firm.

“Power electronics are the only way to overcome stability issues,” agreed another.

Naturally, talk of more generation gave way to talk of local politics and whether people will accept any of this.

Transmission Lines Over Vineyards

A new power plant in the neighborhood is not on most residents’ wish list, and plenty of energy projects have met their fate at the picket line. But maybe people would play ball if they were on the pitch to start.

“People want to make sure they’re benefiting at least as much as it’s costing them,” remarked Sherry Stout, laboratory program manager for NREL’s State, Local, and Tribal activities.

Stout, who works closely with Tribes, reminded the forum that communities want to be part of the conversation. To get projects passed, everyone must be at the negotiation table.

“You have to intentionally bring detractors,” Stout said. “The more you sideline, the more you might bring out a grassroots rejection.”

Panelists discussed ideas like local incentive packages, such as development of a STEM workforce center to train for incoming jobs or diverting waste heat toward community buildings at no cost.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, data center expansion caught the community off guard but resulted in a booming tax base. Loudoun’s Assistant Director of General Services Marc Aveni joined a panel to add the “local county employee” perspective.

“It’s been a bit of a mixed bag. We’ve seen lots of positive revenues, but we didn’t have a good handle on energy and natural resource requirements. It presented a lot of challenges at the local government level,” Aveni explained.

“We’re very happy to be partnering with NREL to work through our challenges,” Aveni said.

Chip-to-Grid

Like Loudon County, NREL has partnered with many, if not all, of the attendees, often helping partners evaluate pivotal energy investments. In the spirit of the forum, NREL Partnership Development Manager Bill Livingood announced an evolution of NREL capabilities: Chip-to-Grid.

Chip-to-Grid is a planned initiative aimed at creating a more seamless and integrated approach to data center development and “to address the problems that one stakeholder alone can’t solve,” Livingood said, like problems of interoperability and especially end-to-end utility to data center compatibility.

Livingood presented Chip-to-Grid alongside Kent Crawford, director of engineering at Schneider Electric, which supports creating the consortium.

“It takes us all,” Crawford reiterated. “None of this works unless it’s an interoperable system. We’ve got to go faster than faster, which means bringing together all the players.”

This builds on NREL’s renowned Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform, as well as NREL’s work in projects like ARPA-E COOLERCHIPS. Forum attendees later toured NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility to appreciate the globally unique research capacity that makes endeavors like Chip-to-Grid feasible.

Emerging Innovations With Appeal

On day two, industry partners and investors alike heard about emerging technology ventures. Four startups, selected by NREL’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, showcased how their technologies could transform the energy performance of data centers.

Palanquin Power, a participant in NREL’s West Gate program, is rethinking rack-level power conversion with a DC-direct-to-server approach. Lucidean’s CEO introduced the company’s custom photonic chip that enables direct fiber optic networking with greater efficiency. Flexnode pitched modular, rapidly deployable data centers tailored for compute-intensive AI workloads. And Flux XII shared its vision for transforming intermittent energy sources into reliable baseload power using low-cost, long-duration storage.

From optical switches to power electronics to flow batteries, the technical topics ran deep. But the predominant themes were never lost: collaborate to add new generation, innovate to advance chips and energy, and evaluate solutions collectively supported by NREL’s resources and expertise.

Decide How To Power Data With NREL

From decision support to whole-system analysis to real-power demonstrations, NREL is a leading institution for energy integration. It is where crosstalk occurs for industry, utilities, and governments and where solutions can move from concept to implementation.

“Getting technology into the marketplace is in our DNA,” NREL Director Martin Keller said. “Our power is bringing everyone together to move this forward as fast as possible.”

Learn more about partnering with NREL.

By Connor O’Neil. Article from NREL,