A familiar sound of modern life is the mobile phone’s tap-tap-tap as we pound out searches for the nearest drugstore or the fastest way home. But search, which has historically been free to use and cheap to provide, is about to get more power hungry. That’s because a single AI-driven query triggers ten times as much needed electricity as traditional search, according to researchers at Goldman Sachs. Providers of these AI chatbots are now scrambling to ensure you don’t notice the difference, and that means driving down costs by adopting leading-edge solutions in power supply.

During the first wave of data center growth, the large hyperscalers like Facebook (Meta) and Google set up facilities, plugged into the grid, and paired the operations to a simple backup generator, typically driven by diesel. That setup will no longer do, says Midhat Mirabi, general manager of the Aeroderivatives New Units business at GE Vernova. “With AI coming into play, they not only need more power, but they are thinking about the future. They want to future-proof these facilities.” According to Mirabi, the new wave of data centers will need far better backup power to ensure reliability, in part because the data centers themselves represent a new, huge pull on the wider power grid. Fortunately, researchers at GE Vernova anticipated this new set of demands years ago as the company began preparing for the AI revolution.

In West Texas, an early, leading-edge case of such future-proofing is now underway. Outside of Abilene, GE Vernova is provisioning 10 LM2500XPRESS aeroderivative natural gas turbines to be installed at a data center. These high-tech turbines are modular, easy to install, fuel flexible, and powerful. For some settings, they can even be mobile. A typical single LM2500XPRESS aero unit with around 35 megawatts can replace 11 or 12 diesel generator sets, according to a GE Vernova white paper authored by Ihab Chaaban, global commercial development director, “The Data Centers AI and ML Trilemma.” By making this one change, data centers can save on emissions, real estate, switchgear, transformers, and their overall footprint. But that’s not all. By building in such robust backup to each data center’s capability, heavy-duty gas turbines or an array of aeroderivative turbines can reach the critical mass needed to run AI computing entirely off the grid, or can even sell power back to the grid. “This is the evolution we are experiencing, along with our customers, to enable future growth,” says Mirabi. It’s also worth noting that GE Vernova currently helps power data centers with its heavy-duty gas turbines.

Liberating the Power Landscape with Flexible Gas

Aeroderivative turbines are unique in that they are highly calibrated, can work together as a flexible power rack, can operate on either gas or liquid fuel, possess up to 100% hydrogen capability in some models for future fuel flexibility, and can turn on and off so rapidly they function almost like a battery. Germany, for example, chose to build a rack of LM2500XPRESS turbines last year at the Biblis Grid Stability power plant, which is dedicated entirely to filling in brief gaps in grid power as the country continues its ascent to ever higher levels of renewables penetration.

“This is actually the beauty of these units,” says Olamide Ogunduyile, product executive for aeroderivative gas turbines at the Gas Power business at GE Vernova. “There’s a lot of uncertainty as to how data centers will operate. So the industry needs a solution that can do both — pure backup, or provide full power to the whole facility.” GE Vernova has modeled several data center iterations that include prime power, backup power, and centers equipped with a battery energy storage system (BESS), offering even more flexibility to the data center.

The crucial feature here, according to Ogunduyile, is that this configuration is far different from having “just a big block” of power supply. Miraculously, the units can indeed act like a big block, but, separately, they can also act like small specialty units, turning on and off quickly to provide fleeting microbursts of power. These flexible capabilities can also help lower data center emissions as well.

The data center where the LM2500XPRESS units are going to be installed also sits in a region of soaring renewable power. Texas is already a top five global wind-energy producer, and recently has seen a starburst of solar deployment. According to a forecast last year from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), combined wind and solar generation are set to double in Texas by 2035. This means that the grid itself is changing, becoming more complex with intermittent sources, which can add to concerns about energy security for industrial users. Indeed, the Texas grid itself has had a couple of bad blackouts in the past few years, not because of renewables but because of changing weather patterns.

This new aeroderivative data center project highlights the changing topography of power, and the new opportunities that provides, say Midhat and Ogunduyile. At the Texas site, the aero gas turbines will be able to sit “behind the meter,” a phrase to describe a power supply that’s not officially part of  the wider grid but, like a homeowner’s rooftop solar array, produces power on-site. In other words, this is energy supply that’s not coming from the grid, but could flip around if necessary and provide power back to the grid, and earn income. Think of it as grid-connected, but not grid dependent. The positioning suggests a new kind of entity that can access grid energy most of the time but can withdraw during outages, like a crab into its shell, to survive until another day. Historically, GE Vernova has been in the electricity production business for the grid, but now it’s responding to the data center world’s evolution toward self-sufficiency. “It’s a harmonized solution,” says Mirabi, one that straddles the myriad changes coming to grid power.

The Quickening Pace of Global Electrification

Suddenly growing power demand growth has taken the world by surprise as electric vehicles, industrial operations, and now hungrier-than-ever data centers flock to the electricity system. But as GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik recently pointed out at Climate Week NYC, growth is the best ally of climate optimism, because it provides the forward momentum to adopt, and afford, new solutions.

At the start of this year, the IEA warned that data center demand alone could double in just four years, from 480 terawatt-hours in 2022 to 1,000 TWh in 2026. That may seem like small growth, given that the world currently uses 30,000 TWh annually, but consider that the United Kingdom, a nation of more than 65 million people, uses just 300 TWh per year. But now, scrambling to keep up, the IEA has again raised its projections for total growth of power to a 4% annual rate, partly because data center growth forecasts keep going higher too. Fortunately, a good portion of that growth can be covered by wind and solar.

But the wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining, which is why both Mirabi and Ogunduyile say power providers are thinking more about energy security, dispatchability, and reliability. Gas turbines can help provide that. With everyone diving into the pool at the same time, blind faith in the grid itself, explains Mirabi, is changing. So while the public will continue to tap-tap-tap for queries, data centers themselves need to ensure two outcomes: that they, too, are tapping into the new world of burgeoning renewable power, while also providing complementary reliable, always-on power.

Achieving both outcomes is possible. “This is a new segment,” says Mirabi, one that aspires to be ecologically friendly, but one that has to be made more robust, “and we at GE Vernova very much want to participate in this new area of demand.”