DCFlex Deliverables

This report examines the rapidly evolving supply chains supporting data center energy infrastructure amid accelerating load growth and increasing pressure on electrical generation equipment. Since EPRI’s 2025 assessment, the industry has reached several key milestones, including record-high gas turbine orders, longer transformer lead times, and the emergence of gigawatt-scale fuel cell procurement as a mainstream planning option. At the same time, solar power continued to dominate new U.S. generation additions despite a decline in total installations compared with 2024.

This report presents results from a field emissions test of HVO versus fossil diesel conducted on May 6, 2026, on a 2 MW Cummins QSK60 Series backup diesel engine (model DQKAB) at a Compass Datacenters facility in Texas. Testing was performed by Mostardi Platt using United States Environmental Protection Agency reference methods at two load conditions, 50% and 100% of rated capacity, for each fuel.

This report examines the growing workforce challenges facing data center development and supporting energy infrastructure, highlighting skilled labor shortages as a critical constraint alongside land, permitting, and energy supply. Building on EPRI’s 2025 workforce analysis, the report identifies the specific trades experiencing the greatest shortages, explains why workforce capacity cannot expand quickly, and introduces U.S. reindustrialization as a major new source of labor demand.

Community acceptance is a key consideration when determining data center siting and development. Internationally, projects are being delayed or canceled as communities become increasingly concerned about the balance of benefits versus impacts during data center development and operation. Community Acceptance in Practice: Strategies for Utilities and Data Center Developers examines what concerns exist and how to build trust from the ground up.

This DCFlex Quick Insight provides an overview of emerging market and regulatory responses to rapid large-load growth in the PJM Interconnection region, with a particular focus on data center expansion and its implications for electricity system planning. It describes key structural pressures facing the grid, such as limitations in existing generation capacity, constraints in transmission systems, and delays associated with bringing new resources online.

This paper summarizes the NERC Level 3 Essential Action Alert issued in response to emerging reliability risks from large computational loads such as data centers. It outlines the seven Essential Actions addressing modeling, system studies, commissioning, protection coordination, disturbance analysis, and operational coordination.

Data center growth is no longer just a transmission-scale issue. Large and often complex facilities are increasingly connecting at the distribution-level in pursuit of faster access to power. What matters is not just how big these loads are, but what they run: workload behavior and facility design can drive very different impacts on planning, operations, and reliability. This creates a blurred boundary between distribution and transmission, where physical connection, regulatory treatment, and system impact do not always align.

This paper examines disturbance ride-through expectations for large data centers and identifies critical gaps in how current requirements are defined, interpreted, and implemented. While grid operators increasingly specify voltage and frequency ride through criteria at the point of interconnection, the paper shows that compliance is ultimately governed by facility-level architectures and equipment-level behavior.

This report provides a primer on data center cooling equipment, offering both a foundational background and a current state-of-the-art review. It examines the cooling requirements and thermal standards that govern cooling system design, details modern cooling technologies, equipment configurations, industry best practices, and water use, and provides a high-level comparison across technology types. Perspectives from two major cooling equipment manufacturers are incorporated to ground the technical discussion in real-world design drivers and market context.

This report provides an overview of current European long-term electric system resource planning in the context of growing data center demand. It examines data center loads, existing and new trends in growth, highlights electricity system planning frameworks and market-based coordination mechanisms, and reviews evolving trends in how data centers are powered. Insights are synthesized from an analysis of European planning frameworks, data, policies, and examples. The findings show that, in Europe, the relationship between data center growth and electricity system planning is co-evolving.