Could electric co-ops profit from data center growth?

As data center developers increasingly seek rural pastures, local electric cooperatives could be the saving grace to their power and permitting issues, said James Tanneberger, CEO of Accord Telecommunications Collaborative. With regards to supporting distributed artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, “we already have a substation that has a transformer sitting there that’s only half loaded,” he said. In other words, a 22.5 MVA transformer may only have “10 MVA of load on it” that the co-op uses to supply power and broadband to its members. “Now we’ve got an opportunity to serve a 10-megawatt load on that substation without having to add any long lead time equipment,” Tanneberger said. “So we’re talking six months from start to finish.” Electric co-ops that offer a power pick-me-up to data centers can reduce their own power costs. Because these utilities cater to a mostly residential base, they need to buy power at “the two most expensive times of the day,” Tanneberger explained, which is when residents wake up and when they come home from work. But a data center that runs all day long “allows us to buy more power during those in-between times and it brings our overall cost of power down,” he said.