Flexibility and Speed to Power, Reading & Podcast Picks, December 7, 2025

A new study on data center flexibility; Odd Lots on rising energy costs; Rewiring America on jobs from DERs; and much more.

Reading and Podcast Picks is a collection of what I’ve been reading and listening to over the last week or so about energy topics.

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Flexible Data Centers: A Faster, More Affordable Path to Power | Camus Energy

Data centers can make grids more reliable, resilient, and affordable if integrated well. A new study out this week sheds light on what that entails::

The answer to the question: can flexibility allows data centers to connect faster? A resounding “yes.” Building on existing “connect and manage” models, our results showed that a small amount of local flexibility could enable loads to connect 3-5 years sooner.

Further, bringing a set of onsite power solutions (including load flexibility, onsite battery, and gas generation), when paired with procured capacity from renewable, battery, or VPP resources, can enable sites to entirely offset the additional system costs of adding new loads.

The result is a better grid - one which can support a lot more load, in which energy and capacity prices both remain stable, and in which there are new sources of system flexibility which can increase the overall resilience of the system.

The full study is linked in the Camus post. I highly encourage anyone interested in this area to spend some time with it. It’s one of the best studies I’ve seen on the topic and likely to garner significant attention, akin to the Duke University demand flexibility study done earlier this year.

The study was co-written by Camus Energy. I talked at lengthen about all these topics with Camus CEO Astrid Atkinson just two months ago:

And Shanu Matthew, one of the best follows on #energytwitter btw, used Notebook LM to create this fantastic explainer video.

Travis Kavulla Explains Why Electric Bills Shot Up, Odd Lots

Of course, there are many reasons why electric bills are rising and it’s complicated. Podcasts are a great format for exploring the complexity. Travis is one of the smartest energy people out there and Odd Lots is one of the best business podcasts out there. So, predictably, this episode was excellent.

On data centers:

How do you get them online without tripping into a bunch of necessary capital investments to serve that last few percent of hours where their demand needs to be served? Or can you source flexibility out of the system from somewhere else, like residential air conditioning, or something like that?

That’s a question that’s very important to figure out. People have kind of issue-spotted it but we’ve kind of really yet to solve it in any meaningful way.

The markets like Texas are geared toward solving it in more of a free enterprise premise, other markets seem to be struggling a bit.

So much more good stuff in this one. And to hear my more about using distributed flexibility to lower costs and increase grid reliability, listen to my discussion with Travis:

Home upgrades can power job growth | Rewiring America

Picking up on Travis’ point, permanent residential and small business demand reductions from energy efficiency and demand flexibility can lower consumers’ energy bills and create headroom on the grid for data centers. The classic win-win. But the benefits don’t stop there.