Dive Brief:
- A new partnership between off-grid power systems provider DC Grid and energy services firm Liberty Energy seeks to provide data centers and EV hubs with modular, scalable off-grid power solutions in a matter of months, the companies announced Jan. 7.
- The partners expect to be able to deploy “small scale power output” within three months for fleet EV charging hubs and “hundreds of megawatts” within 12-18 months for data centers, they said in the announcement.
- The partnership expects to be “especially useful for data centers and fleet EV hubs that are in long queues for service upgrades from the local utilities,” said DC Grid CEO and founder Vic Shao.
Dive Insight:
In many parts of North America, utilities and regional power grid operators have seen a surge in requests for heavy power users to connect to the grid. In the Houston area, for example, electric utility CenterPoint Energy saw a 700% year-over-year increase in interconnection requests from data center developers in 2024, Bloomberg reported on Oct. 28.
FTI Consulting expects global electricity demand from data centers and AI clusters to increase from 41 gigawatts in 2023 to 71 GW in 2027 as the average facility in some areas, like Northern Virginia, grows from about 30 megawatts to as much as 90 MW.
Utilities are racing to upgrade their grids in response. CenterPoint invested about $3.7 billion in its Houston network in 2024 and plans to spend another $4.9 billion in 2025, Data Center Dynamics reported. But major infrastructure upgrades, such as new transmission lines, require lengthy planning and permitting processes that can take five to 10 years to bring online, FTI Consulting noted. And in congested power markets with lots of existing data centers, new data centers face long waits to connect to the grid, it said.
The DC Grid and Liberty Energy partnership aims to help customers sidestep these bottlenecks and “accelerate deployment timelines for critical infrastructure projects,” the partners said.
The collaboration combines DC Grid’s off-grid modular direct-current power systems with Liberty Energy’s “low emissions mobile power generation” systems, which can run on fossil gas, renewable natural gas or hydrogen, the companies said. The modular design allows systems to scale with sites’ power needs, they added.
DC Grid’s 300-kilowatt EV charging station contains four dual NACS/CCS DC fast chargers with a total of eight ports. Its data center solution is a server rack-mounted module that connects directly to on-site power generation equipment.
DC Grid says its “proprietary EV charging and datacenter technologies operate at 99% efficiency,” resulting in minimal loss and waste heat during operation. Compared with traditional power systems connected to the commercial grid, its solutions avoid up to 20% of energy losses from power conversion and up to 33% in transmission and distribution systems, it said in a Dec. 19 press release.
A DC Grid spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions about the Liberty Energy partnership.
