By Ethan Howland of UtilityDive.com
Despite the Ratepayer Protection Pledge’s call for planned data centers to supply their own new generation, existing power plants will play a major role in supplying them with power, according to Joseph Dominguez, Constellation president and CEO.
“We’re never going to build this economy if … we have to wait for new power plants to be built before we can connect any data center,” Dominguez said Thursday during an earnings conference call. “The bedrock of building out at least this early phase of the data economy is going to rely heavily, in my view, on existing generation.”
Dominguez said there is significant available capacity in the transmission and generation system that can serve consumers more than 99% of all hours in a year.
“We have a peak capacity concern, not an energy concern,” he said. “The secret sauce here is to deal with the handful of peak hours that present reliability concerns, and at the same time to harvest the stranded capacity that exists every other hour of the year.”
The peak periods can be managed with batteries, demand response and peaking resources, according to Dominguez.
“[Potential customers] still have to figure out not just the peak, but what they’re doing every other hour of the year,” he said. “That’s where our fleet becomes extraordinarily valuable because it’s a fixed-price, clean energy resource that they could count on for decades.”
READ MORE AT SOURCE »« Back to The Culture War
