Getting Data Centers to Power Faster Through Planning and Partnership | Hitachi Energy

Duration: 5:25 797 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

Divya Bansal from Hitachi Energy highlights a critical challenge facing data center developers and operators today: balancing restricted supply chains with the market's demand for rapid deployment. To address this, Hitachi Energy emphasizes the importance of proactive supplier planning combined with design standardization tailored to specific customer needs, seismic conditions, and building requirements. By collaborating closely with clients to create alternative sourcing strategies and utilizing long-term agreements, the company aims to secure global manufacturing capacity early on. This approach allows customers to reserve necessary resources in advance, effectively getting ahead of potential bottlenecks and accelerating their path from project projection to execution. The strategy extends beyond supply chain management through the implementation of prefabricated and modularized solutions that significantly reduce deployment cycles. Hitachi Energy also leverages its end-to-end capabilities, ranging from grid integration to chip-level power solutions, to offer flexible power systems that mitigate risks associated with construction schedules. In an era where traditional interconnection queues can stretch four to seven years, particularly in regions like California, the company promotes behind-the-meter power solutions and microgrids as essential strategies. By utilizing natural gas as a bridging power source and partnering with firms like Baker Hughes for on-site generation, Hitachi Energy helps bring electricity to sites much sooner than waiting for full grid connection permits. Community engagement and partnership have emerged as fundamental norms in this evolving landscape, requiring the industry to move beyond transactional relationships toward deep collaboration. Hitachi Energy advocates for engaging local communities well before any project decisions are finalized, ensuring that stakeholders are included in conversations regarding potential impacts such as noise, environmental concerns, and power usage. This transparency involves clearly communicating the broader benefits of data center projects, including advancements in education, healthcare, economic development, and job creation within the area. By fostering trust through early and honest dialogue with local residents, companies can build a supportive environment that facilitates smoother project approvals and long-term success. Ultimately, the combination of strategic planning, technological flexibility, and genuine community partnership enables data centers to power up faster while maintaining social responsibility.

Read the full video transcript

Hi, my name is Divya Bansal. I'm working at Hitachi Energy as an account director for the co-location data center market. Great question. I think this has been the theme of discussion this year at Data Center Front Data Center Frontier Trends Summit, right? It's like how do we get faster from projection to execution? So, at Hitachi Energy we've been serving co-location and hyperscale market and we see this one of the biggest challenges today for them as as developers and operators is how do we balance the restricted supply chain with the speed to market this market demands, right? So, I can tell you that we we have seen some success in helping our customer base overcoming these challenges using a combination of proactive supplier planning process with design standardization across their bills and combining it with some technology flexibility. And what this what this means is that us as their OEM suppliers, right? As their partners that are willing to work alongside with them to co-create and collaborate for alternative sourcing strategies. We want to get ahead of the game, right? We want visibility into their their projected and forecasted pipeline of projects [music] so we can get them the access to a global manufacturing footprint so they can reserve capacity utilizing long-term agreements and capacity [music] reservation slot agreements, right? And and this get this allows them to get ahead of the game and and build faster. Secondly, I would say is we're working with our customers drive design standardization across all of their campuses, right? This and the design standardization varies from customer to customer. It is not one solution fits all kind of a situation, right? It's very specific to a specific customer, right? The the tenants and their building for and the location where they are, the seismic conditions and things like that, right? So, we we work with our customers to drive that design standardization, bring in a lot of the prefabricated and modularized solutions that will reduce their deployment cycle and and kind of reduce their time to power and provide them with the flexibility and fungibility that they were looking for. And third, I would like to highlight is our end-to-end solutions from grid to chip, right? Bringing in our grid integration and grid automation groups to drive flexible power solutions around grid expand, right? Bringing in battery energy storage solutions, bringing in power quality with e-start.com that can help our customers deploy faster and actually also reduce the risk for schedule on site. So, so these are the strategies that has helped us help our customers build faster and and be successful. Yeah, so traditional traditionally we were interconnecting, right? To the grids and today the interconnection queues are growing longer. We're looking into four to five to seven years, right? In California. So, I think behind the meter power solutions have been has been and the microgrid as a strategy has been a great solution for for for data center developers and operators to bring in power and electrons to the site sooner, right? And we are again helping with these customers bring in our power consulting team do a lot of the interconnection studies, do a lot of feasibility studies, right? That can help drive a lot of the conversations with the utilities and get in the queue faster, bring in the microgrid solution using natural gas which is our a next bridging power that we are saying, right? Bring in those solutions. So, our partnership with Baker Hughes, Hitachi Energy working with Baker Hughes [music] to bring in power generation solutions on site faster. Those are some of the strategies. And again, partnership is the new norm in this market, right? We cannot do this alone. We need partners to drive faster connection. So, that's that's those are some of the things that we're looking into with our customers. Oh gosh, this is a great question. And this was talked about a lot in the morning in next room, right? It's community perception, right? What really the community is expecting from the industry is a lot of openness and transparency and collaboration, right? It's It's about engaging with our community ahead of time, not after the decision is made, right? It's about bringing our local stakeholders into the conversation, talking to them about the impacts around power, around noise, around environmental impacts, right? And also giving them insights into the benefits these projects are going to drive, whether it's education industry, whether it's health and medicine, right? Or or it's around economic development, bringing in more jobs in the area. So, I think bringing in that collaboration and and talking to our communities more and more often is going to drive that trust.