WS4: Planning & Portfolio Readiness

The DCFlex Load Shape Library provides access to standardized hourly data center load shapes derived from measured power consumption data from multiple facilities. The library enables users to explore, visualize, and compare demand characteristics across different facility sizes, ownership models, and workload types.

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. It shows how semiconductor manufacturing, EV battery production, advanced manufacturing, data center construction, and grid expansion are competing for the same specialized workforce in many regions. The report also distinguishes among construction, commissioning, and operations labor markets, each with unique workforce characteristics and risks, and provides insights into regional workforce hotspots, structural barriers to labor supply growth, and practical tools to help industry stakeholders anticipate and address emerging workforce constraints.

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. To address ongoing supply chain constraints, manufacturers and developers are increasingly pursuing regionalized production strategies, backed by significant new investments in North American manufacturing capacity. Drawing on technology comparisons and interviews with utility procurement and supply chain leaders, this report provides an updated overview of the opportunities, challenges, and trends shaping energy supply chains for data centers.

This report synthesizes insights from structured EPRI interviews with three utilities—Duke Energy, Nebraska Public Power District, and Salt River Project—focused on their strategies for supporting data center growth. The interviews capture candid perspectives on demand forecasts, capacity expansion, grid impacts, policy and regulatory drivers, transmission constraints, supply-chain and workforce considerations, and decarbonization pathways. Data center flexibility emerged as a cross-cutting theme, with each organization outlining implications and research needs relevant to EPRI’s DCFlex Initiative.

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. Power system constraints, planning practices, and policy frameworks are shaping the scale, location, and characteristics of data center investments in both established and emerging markets. Large-scale data center demand is also influencing where and how generation, networks, and flexibility resources are developed to serve it. Planning approaches that emphasize cross-sector coordination and the use of demand-side efficiency and flexibility from both the grid and large electricity users are increasingly central to managing this interaction.

This discussion paper introduces a practical framework to help power system planners assess how much additional load, particularly from rapidly growing data centers, can be integrated without expanding generation, storage, or transmission infrastructure. As large loads provide new opportunities for the electricity industry to plan for unprecedented growth, the framework defines and quantifies “technical headroom” through a staged analytical approach: probabilistic resource adequacy assessments to capture uncertainty, hourly nodal simulations to reflect operational constraints and transmission limits, and sub-hourly modeling to capture fast dynamics such as load variability and ramping. At each stage, the analysis compares inflexible and flexible data center operations, demonstrating how demand flexibility and on-site resources can mitigate reliability risks and unlock additional capacity. The paper also highlights practical considerations for realizing this headroom—including co-simulating the potential effect of grid-enhancing technologies (GETs) and following on with more detailed ac power flow simulations to analyze locational constraints—positioning the framework as a complementary tool to traditional hosting capacity and load interconnection studies, and a transparent method for planning for faster, reliability-conscious load integration.

This white paper investigates how electric companies across Canada are planning for emerging large loads and data centres. It analyzes recently submitted Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) and long-term energy planning outlooks to assess projected load growth, planned generation capacity additions, and provincial strategies for accommodating large-scale new loads. The report also explores opportunities for system benefits through data centre flexibility and discusses strategies to advance long-term resource planning practices to support emerging needs.

This study evaluates supply-side technology pathways to meet DC demand through 2035 under varying scenarios of DC demand growth, federal policy, and carbon-free electricity (CFE) procurement targets. The analysis incorporates updated demand projections, recent changes to federal energy policy under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), and current technology cost trends.

This white paper examines how ISP can guide the design of future power systems with significant DC growth, outlining the phases of ISP and showing how each phase addresses the specific planning challenges and opportunities introduced by these large, complex loads. ration potential.

This report introduces a two-part framework for forecasting data center load for planning timescales at higher spatial and temporal resolutions within a region. The first part analyzes the geographic drivers of development, such as land suitability, infrastructure readiness, and local market maturity. The second part focuses on temporal granularity, leveraging historical trends to anticipate short-term variability. Together, these analyses offer a foundation for planning future grid capacity and infrastructure needs.

Regions across the globe are expecting significant load growth from data centers. A prior EPRI white paper presented a framework for forecasting regional data center load growth. This report provides case studies on using the framework to create forecasts for three regions: New York State, the Pacific Northwest, and the Southeastern United States. The results illustrate how electric system planners can apply the framework using data available from their load interconnection queues and the DCFlex project. Additionally, the results highlight the importance of forecasts accounting for not only uncertainty regarding how projects in the load interconnection queue will enter electric service, but also uncertainty related to differences in requested capacity versus actual demand and load ramping schedules.

This report provides a library of load shapes for a range of type of data centers. The load shapes were derived from empirical measurements from operational data centers. System planners and load forecasters can use the load shapes directly. Note this is the first version of the load shape library and EPRI plans to refine and expand the library throughout the DCFlex project.