Last week, Invenergy sponsored the Oklahoma State University Hamm Institute for American Energy’s Powering AI global leadership summit. On a panel about infrastructure and AI, Invenergy’s Chief Commercial Officer Jim Shield joined colleagues from NVIDIA and Google to discuss the criticality of interregional transmission in unleashing American-made energy and winning the AI race.
You can read some excerpts below:
On the customer demand today, Shield said: “There’s a lot of real demand that's growing. Back then [in the 1990s], it was more replacement of older generation with more efficient generation. Now it's like we need new capacity and energy sources. And that's kind of the shift that I've seen in the last 18 to 20 months.”
Shield continued: “We’ve actually seen real capacity or demand being added to the systems…and [customer] demand is going to be there for a long time.”
On much-needed grid updates to strengthen resiliency and safely power the AI race, Shield said: “[The grid] needs some upgrades… people have been investing in it and it wasn't ever designed for this situation…[and we need to] make it a little bit more resilient.”
On serving data center energy needs while strengthening U.S. national security through grid reliability and supply availability, Shield said: “Maybe we get some behind-the-meter generation going to start off…[but] everyone wants to be connected to the grid. That's where you can get the reliability and the supply from.”
Shield continued: “If you really want to optimize the system, [you need to] able to move power back and forth to where it's needed at the time it's needed.”
On letting the private sector meet data center demand, Shield said: “A stable policy environment…[which] allow us to unleash all the forms energy right now… [T]he development of the project…takes five to seven years just before you can start construction…[L]et the government get out of the way…[and] let the private industry take care of the issue.”