Mainspring Energy’s Post

Thanks to all who joined us last week in Washington, D.C., for Energize's Sustainable Innovation Summit: Data Centers!   In our final SIS of 2025, we hosted four closed-door sessions with leaders from utilities, policy, and technology to explore one of the biggest questions in climate today: How can we optimize compute infrastructure and meet AI-driven energy demand?   A few of our takeaways:   ⚡️ The biggest constraint on AI growth is no longer chips but power, as interconnection queues and grid delays redefine the limits of digital infrastructure. 💪 Flexibility is emerging as the key unlock, allowing data centers to shift, pause, or relocate workloads and become resources for the grid. 🏛️ Fragmented permitting and policy frameworks are a key challenge to deployment, highlighting the need for stronger coordination between federal and state regulators. 🌐 Most data centers run at about 50% utilization, and AI-driven orchestration can boost efficiency without adding new hardware. 🤝 Earning community trust and maintaining global competitiveness will depend on proving that data centers can create shared value for local communities, utilities, and the broader economy.   A big thank you to our panelists: Pierson Stoecklein (Exowatt), Joel Jansen (American Electric Power), Craig Gordon (Mainspring Energy), Kevin Stevens (Energize), Matt Stansberry (Uptime Institute), Matthew Brocklehurst (Sitetracker), Andrew C. Wills (Invenergy), Meredith Breach Bos (Energize), Varun Sivaram (Emerald AI), Eileen Waris (Energize), Ken Sullivan (Bay Compute), Chad Gibson (Neuralwatt), Stephen Sandford (CoreWeave), Agustina Soriano Sergi (Energize) 🗞️ We’ll be sharing more of our research on data center flexibility next week! Stay tuned at energizecap.com/news.