“If I have tens of thousands of homes that are participating in a flexibility program, I can statistically be confident that during the highest load, 50, 100, 250 hours a summer, those thermostats are going to respond. … I then can get confident in connecting a 500-megawatt data center at a 400-megawatt point of interconnection. Because that incremental 100 megawatts is a few hundred hours a year where supply and demand are mismatched that load flexibility can operate against.”
Interchange Recharged · Climate & Energy · November 2026
Context
Asked how residential flexibility helps utilities with data center interconnection and load growth, the guest argues utilities could plan around the load reductions that enrolled homes reliably deliver.
Transcript
…not doing as good of a job as we need to in leveraging the demand stack, engaging with consumers, connecting those devices, operating those devices to make flexibility a core strategy for a utility as opposed to sort of sitting out there in the sort of the more the niche area of customer programs.
…specifically mentions helping utilities manage AI-driven data center demand. Can Octopus's walk me through that connection? How is it that residential flexibility can help with the challenges that utilities are facing, will continue to face around data center interconnection and load growth?
We think there's a lot of opportunity there. It's an opportunity set that has been not fully explored, but let me give you a couple examples. So Virginia, right now, there's a lot of community pushback, particularly in Loudoun County, against data centers. And a lot of it's being characterized as data centers are causing rates to go up. Deploying flexibility, as I've said earlier, is one of the most effective strategies we have available to us in the short run, at least, to help lower customer bills. Being able to really lean into customer flexibility, be it connecting the devices customers already have, or actually deploying new things like batteries into homes in somewhere like Loudoun County, and being able to characterize this as, yes, these large loads are coming. And as part of these large loads coming and part of the investment they're making, they're making investments in empowering you, consumer, to take control over your energy bill and lower your rates. So there's that opportunity, which is more of a cause and effect than a direct relationship. So that's one. The second is we're seeing with bring your own capacity, which is an emergent tool that large loads are starting to consider, whereby flexibility providers will create net new capacity in…
I would have to agree. I guess my only question off of the back of that would be, when do you think that that would be feasible? Because that's a lot of spinning plates to control all at the same time.
All of this stuff is, all this stuff is moving very fast, right? Let's take a really interesting example of a model akin to this. And it's what's happening in Minnesota with Excel Energy. Excel Energy is deploying larger scale batteries at commercial industrial sites to mitigate the demands from…
I think you've shared that this is moving very fast with this partnership. You really have to start getting into the weeds first before you can draw any conclusions. But if you had to say, looking out 18 months, 24 months, what do you think success looks like through this partnership? What should…
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