Brian Zahnstecher
Abstract Title
Keeping Both the Grid and Load Happy in Muli-MW Data Center Implementations
The rapid emergence of multi-megawatt—and soon gigawatt-scale—data center deployments poses transformative challenges across the entire energy and computing ecosystem, spanning from the utility grid to the chip. While past efforts have focused primarily on meeting escalating power density and transient load requirements within data centers, the recent “more-than-Moore” scaling of energy demand has revealed a critical gap between power generation, delivery, and consumption. This growing disparity exposes fundamental limitations in a legacy grid architecture that was never designed to support such massive, dynamic, and increasingly bidirectional energy flows.
As data center installations begin to approach or exceed the peak electrical loads of entire states, grid integrity and resilience must be re-envisioned through new paradigms in system design, control, and coordination. This emerging landscape is catalyzing an “energy space race” to integrate diverse energy resources—including traditional generation, distributed energy systems, microgrids, and hybrid configurations—while accelerating deployment of energy storage systems (ESS) at multiple scales. These systems will be central to enabling virtual power plants (VPPs), enhancing grid flexibility, and supporting regulatory and local resilience objectives.
This workshop discussion will highlight this pivotal juncture for research and innovation at the intersection of energy systems, power electronics, and large-scale computing infrastructure. It will outline key opportunities for academia, industry, and government to collaborate on foundational challenges such as scalable control architectures, data-driven grid modeling, and sustainable energy integration strategies—ensuring that future AI and cloud data centers can grow responsibly within a resilient, intelligent, and decarbonized power ecosystem.
Biography
Brian Zahnstecher is a Sr. Member of the IEEE, Chair (Emeritus) of the IEEE SFBAC Power Electronics Society (PELS), IEEE PELS North America Regional (R1-3) Chair, Chair PELS Sustainability “GREENS” Ad-hoc Committee, Power Sources Manufacturers Association (PSMA) Board of Directors (Emeritus) and now Advisory Council, authors the quarterly Power Rocks! column for IEEE Power Electronics Magazine (PEM), is Co-founder & Chair (Emeritus) of the PSMA Reliability Committee, Co-chair of the PSMA Energy Harvesting Committee, Co-founder & Co-chair of the EnerHarv workshop, and is the Principal of PowerRox. He Co-chairs the IEEE Future Networks (formerly 5G) webinar series and is a founding Co-chair of the IEEE International Network Generations Roadmap (INGR) Energy Efficiency Working Group and has lectured on related power and sustainability topics at major industry conferences. He sits on Advisory Boards of major conferences like Sensors Converge & DesignCon. He previously held positions in power electronics, most recently with Claros (Sr. Principal Energy Efficiency Architect), as well as industry leaders Emerson Network Power (now Advanced Energy), Cisco, and Hewlett-Packard. He has been a regular contributor on power and sustainability topics to the industry as an invited keynote speaker, author/columnist, workshop participant, session host, roundtable moderator, and volunteer. He has over 20 years of industry experience and holds Master and Bachelor degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Contact
bz@powerrox.com