Webinar: ESIG Large Loads Task Force: Background Information, Data and Flexibility Needs

Featured Speakers: Julia Matevosyan, Associate Director, Chief Engineer, ESIG; Trieu Mai, Visiting Fellow, ESIG

About the Webinar: Large electrical loads, such as data centers, hydrogen production facilities, and EV fleet charging facilities, present significant new challenges for the electric power industry.

These new challenges include:

Difficulties in accurately forecasting demand without a public and transparent interconnection queue; reliable information about energy use patterns, limited financial or other firm commitments from large load developers; and project completion data

Lack of thorough understanding from industry stakeholders of the performance of different types of large loads, how this performance will affect the power system, and how large loads could potentially provide essential power system reliability services

Lack of large load-specific interconnection requirements that would enable interconnection planning engineers to thoroughly study the effects of these large loads on the power system before energization

Challenges in modeling large loads and their type-dependent and varied performance characteristics in the reliability studies

Systemic procedural and regulatory impediments to plan and build transmission infrastructure at the pace necessary to reliably deliver energy to these rapidly interconnecting large electrical loads

Difficulties in ensuring resource adequacy due to uncertainty in load forecast

Difficulties across all topic areas in securing the needed data, whether it be for forecasts, electrical models, or flexibility potential

Meanwhile, large load developers are also left to grapple with the challenges summarized above, and more. Addressing these challenges in a timely manner is critical to the further growth of large load industries, reliability of the bulk power system, and electricity affordability.

It’s against this background that the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) has launched a Large Loads Task Force (LLTF) to convene stakeholders, identify challenges and practical solutions, and develop harmonized best practices that help ensure reliable and efficient grid integration while supporting industry growth. The LLTF kicked off with an introductory webinar on December 17th, 2024, outlining the scope, format, and deliverables of the task force.

This webinar will cover the first deliverable of the ESIG Large Load Taskforce, namely the Introduction Report that is currently being finalized. The webinar will cover background information on large load growth and identify gaps with large load integration into power systems. Specifically, we’ll focus on data needs and availability as well as large load flexibility considerations.