Why the Next Datacenter Should Be Sized for a Village, Not a City
The article discusses the need for smaller datacenters that can integrate with local energy communities to optimize renewable energy usage. It highlights the mismatch between large datacenters and distributed renewable energy generation, which leads to wasted energy. A proposed solution is the development of controllable, community-sized datacenters that can adapt their energy consumption based on local renewable production.
- ▪Energy communities are generating surplus renewable energy but lack nearby demand to utilize it.
- ▪Large datacenters consume significant power but are inflexible and unable to adapt to local energy production.
- ▪A smaller datacenter, sized for a community, can effectively absorb and utilize surplus energy generated from local renewable sources.
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Why the Next Datacenter Should Be Sized for a Village, Not a City May 30, 2026 · Nicola Bortignon The energy transition has a coordination problem hiding in plain sight. Energy communities across Europe and the US are installing solar and wind at record pace, but export caps force them to curtail generation on sunny afternoons. Good energy, wasted because there is no one nearby to use it. At the same time, the datacenter industry is building ever-larger facilities, 100 MW, 500 MW, soon 1 GW, that consume flat baseload power regardless of when or where renewables are producing, and that sit in interconnection queues for 5-10 years. These two problems should cancel each other out.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Nicola Bortignon.
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