A handful of hyperscale datacenter customers are now large enough, individually, to force a utility to redo its long-range grid plan.
Interconnection queue filings reviewed by the Financial Times show single-site load requests exceeding the total demand growth utilities had forecast for their entire service territory over the same period.
Grid planners who once modeled demand in single-digit-percent annual increments are now fielding requests that would, on their own, double a substation's committed capacity.
— Marcus Reyes