Data Centers: Standards Needs Analysis and Recommendations

The growth of new data center facilities has been accelerating to keep pace with our ever-increasing digital society and particularly fueled by the computational needs associated with artificial intelligence applications.

This growth is creating significant challenges for infrastructure to provide services in support of data center operations, particularly for power and energy supplies, water consumption and related utilities. Most infrastructure, as well as legacy data centers is designed and built based on industry standards, however in some cases, the rapid deployment of new construction is putting pressure on the infrastructure with use cases that were not fully anticipated in relevant legacy standards.

The motivation of this activity is to recommend new standards activity to help with the growing scale of data center construction and infrastructure. This topic is highly cross-disciplinary, requiring a systems approach involving stakeholders of different backgrounds. This will improve mutual understanding of technical requirements present in Electric Power Systems and Data Center Infrastructure.  Standards development is often addressed more narrowly for specific technical domains. Developing a path that brings these sometimes contrasting approaches together will be a key towards development and implementation of the standards needed to help assure reliable operations of both data centers and their supporting infrastructure.

The goal of this initiative is to identify the current state of standards relevant to data centers, and the anticipated future state needed, and to define a path for the standards community to reach that future state. Topical areas will be defined by the participants, but an initial topical list for discussion will include:

• Interconnection challenges from the grid to data center – review and identify any needs for standards revisions, particularly related to grid reliability
• Grid reliability issues in dealing with much shorter time constants — this would apply to any fast-changing load (including IBR – Inverter-Based Resources) but it becomes very prominent with large loads due to their potential very large impacts.  Our models may need refinement to keep up with this.
• Understanding data center energy load challenges and localized needs
• Clarity in key metrics used by stakeholders
• Localized data center energy generation – microgrids, etc.
• Ability to predict and meet energy and demand requirements
• Huge forecast uncertainties
• Co-location — definition and requirement

All the entities and different groups of individuals that are involved with datacenters, grid to datacenter energy issues, and datacenter operational considerations.

To learn more about the program and how to join the Data Centers: Standards Needs Analysis and Recommendations activity, please express your interest by completing the Data Centers: Standards Needs Analysis and Recommendations interest form.