To Handle Data Centers, the Electricity System May Need New Rules. Here Is a Proposal

There are not many desirable options for accommodating the electricity needs of data centers.

And some of the possibilities are especially bad—bad for consumers, bad for the environment and even bad for data centers.

Alexandra Klass, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Dave Owen, a professor at UC Law San Francisco, have been thinking about whether there’s a better way, and they wrote about it in an article forthcoming in the George Washington Law Review.

Their proposal calls for moving away from the idea that the grid needs to have enough power plant capacity to accommodate all users at all times, and instead take an approach in which data centers and other superusers are treated as a separate customer class with special rules and added flexibility. • ICN Weekly