"Utilities are struggling to meet demand as AI data centers surge. Equipping air conditioners with batteries could be an easy and hugely scalable way to free up electricity supply at peak times."
"The U.S. is a nation of air-conditioned houses, and this ubiquitous cooling machinery drives an outsize chunk of the country’s electrical demand, especially during heat waves. Now, as utilities scramble to meet even more power demand for AI computing, legacy air-conditioning giant Carrier has launched a new business venture to make regular old HVAC equipment part of the solution.
The concept is simple enough: Put a battery on central ACs that can charge up when energy is plentiful and take over the job of running the appliances when the grid is stressed. But actually doing that requires grappling with the forces that shape America’s energy system — monopoly utilities, regulators, decentralized energy, intermittent renewable power, and the looming colossus of data centers’ energy consumption.
“The homes we have and the fact that they all have air conditioning or a heat pump defines how the grid is sized, built, and operated today,” said Hakan Yilmaz, Carrier’s chief technology and sustainability officer and head of its energy-solutions arm, in an interview at this month’s RE+ conference. “The [U.S.’s] peak load is about 750 gigawatts — that’s what the grid can manage today. Around 300 gigawatts of that is reserved for HVAC.”"
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