Amanda Simonian leads strategic marketing and communications for TerraFlow Energy, a Texas-based developer of long-term energy storage solutions.
I spent most of September on the road, from RE+ in Las Vegas to Climate Week NYC, Houston Energy and Climate Week, and the World Power Data Center in San Antonio. Four different audiences, four very different rooms, but one conversation that always surfaced: power. Not just how much we need, but what kind. Quality, stability and real stress being placed on a grill that was never built for what’s to come.
It’s the problem no one planned for. As the next wave of data centers goes live, operators are finding that the real challenge isn’t just finding enough megawatts. It’s what happens when those megawatts don’t sit still.
AI workloads don’t consume power like traditional computing does. They go out They are idle. They fluctuate thousands of times per second, driving load profiles that look less like a flat demand curve and more like an EKG. For utilities and transport operators, this volatility is more than an inconvenience. It is a destabilizing force in local feeders and substations that were never designed to handle such rapid swings.
Industry experts have been warning about this for over a year. Recent reliability assessments have pointed to the rise of large emerging payloads such as AI campuses, cryptominers and hydrogen plants that are reshaping the behavior of the network. The North American Electric Reliability Corp. has noted similar concerns in its discussions of these new types of load, including their unpredictable growth, extreme ramp rates, and the coordination challenges they create for utilities and network operators.
The network can handle heavy loads. What it can’t handle, at least not yet, is a 300 MW campus that behaves like a strobe light, pulling hard one second and backing off the next. Journey of the Transformers. The frequency control tightens. Backup generation spins when it shouldn’t. And the more facilities come online, the more volatility compounds.
This was not an unknown risk, just underestimated. Engineers warned of harmonic distortion and ramp rate limits long before “AI” became a buzzword. But the pace of construction outpaced the pace of adaptation. What was once a handful of hyperscale sites has become a nationwide build measured in gigawatts, each with microgrid volatility.
The truth is simple: every data center is about to play a role in network stability, whether they like it or not. Power quality, inertia and ramp control are no longer just network issues. They are the new operating parameters of the digital infrastructure.
The fact is that this change does not have to be a burden. In fact, it’s an opportunity to turn what was once a stress point into a stabilizing resource for the network. But meeting this challenge requires technology built for continuous cycling and endurance. Lithium-ion, optimized for short discharges and limited duty cycles, was never designed to chase the power curve of a data center all day. Flow batteries, on the other hand, can. They work like engines with fuel tanks: stable, durable and capable of running almost infinitely without degradation.
Long-duration flow systems can sit quietly on the DC link, absorbing or releasing power in milliseconds to smooth out peaks before they reach the grid. They bridge the gap between UPS and energy storage, conditioning power in real time and maintaining it for hours when needed.
This is the next evolution of resiliency: not just keeping servers online, but keeping the power around them. It is a design choice, an engineering discipline and, increasingly, a responsibility.
The grid of the future will not be built around data centers. It will be built with them. And those who get it first will define how the next decade of digital growth stays online.
