Dive Brief:
- National Grid is teaming up with GridCARE to “identify and unlock” interconnection capacity for large-load customers in New York, the companies said on March 25.
- GridCARE’s Energize platform uses AI modeling, grid simulations and “real-time system intelligence” to find spare capacity on the grid, potentially reducing interconnection headways from several years to “as little as six to 12 months,” the companies said.
- The announcement did not mention specific customers that might benefit from the initiative. In an email, GridCARE CEO Amit Narayan said his company’s capabilities had drawn “significant interest from various sectors,” including large-scale manufacturers and data centers.
Dive Insight:
In a statement, National Grid President and Group Chief Strategy Officer Steve Smith said finding and utilizing spare grid capacity is the “fastest and least expensive way” to add new load.
“By responsibly unlocking latent capacity through modern, physics-based AItools, we can support economic growth, strengthen reliability, and protect affordability for the customers and communities we serve,” he said.
Data center construction costs rose from $7.7 million/MW in 2020 to $10.7 million/MW in 2025, commercial real estate firm JLL said in a January report on the state of the industry. Those figures exclude computing equipment but do encompass electrical infrastructure, which JLL said is a significant driver of project costs and siting decisions.
Still, speed to power remains “the primary criteria driving site selection,” JLL said.
GridCARE uses generative AI to sift through “quadrillions” of operating scenarios and identify conditions under which the grid could become constrained, according to last week’s announcement. Its platform then identifies potential capacity-boosting solutions, including flexibility assets like batteries and other forms of distributed energy.
The need to identify and unlock spare grid capacity is especially acute in regions with “new or phased expansions of large loads that would typically face multi-year connection delays due to required transmission upgrades,” Narayan said.
In October, GridCARE and Portland General Electric said the California-based company’s platform would free up 80 MW of capacity for data center interconnections this year. PGE already serves 800 MW of data center capacity in and around the Portland suburb of Hillsboro and anticipates energizing 400 MW more — much of it in the same area — by 2029, Larry Bekkedahl, PGE’s senior vice president of strategy and advanced energy delivery, told Utility Dive at the time.
Narayan said GridCARE’s collaboration with National Grid would focus mostly on “concentrated areas with minimal supply resources” or locations near both dispatchable and renewable generation resources. National Grid’s upstate New York territory stretches from Lake Erie to the Adirondack Mountains and draws power from a mix of nuclear, gas, hydro and wind generation.
The region has recently seen a wave of interest from data center developers attracted by the relatively cheap, clean power and spare interconnection capacity at retired power plants and manufacturing sites.
High-tech manufacturing projects could also boost regional power demand in the years ahead. Micron broke ground earlier this year on a $100 billion foundry complex north of Syracuse that could host up to four chip production facilities within 20 years. To support the project, which Sustain CNY says will consume 7.15 TWh/year in 2032 and up to 16.17 TWh/year in 2043, National Grid will expand a nearby substation and lay eight “underground ultra-high-voltage lines,” according to a local media report.
In addition to reducing “time to power,” GridCARE’s solution can boost grid utilization, which the company says could help address customers’ and ratepayer advocates’ affordability concerns. It released a study in December showing that a hypothetical 1-GW data center in a mid-sized utility territory could reduce costs by 5% across all customer classes or free up more than $1.35 billion in capital for the utility by incorporating a “modest amount of flexibility.”
