Goals for the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions
The ACES vision centers on communities and on partnerships with stakeholders in a variety of areas to develop electrification pathways to achieving targeted goals for cost, water use, emissions, energy security and reliability, and grid efficiency. The broader goals include:
- Creating efficient energy generation, storage, and grid interface solutions to support community electrification.
- Developing data-driven control and grid integration solutions that enable electrification of communities while ensuring grid resilience and efficiency.
- Constructing coordinated policies that enable efficient electrification across three energy-intensive sectors that are common to all communities: water, buildings, and transportation.
Through these goals, we aim to enable energy independence and resilience for all kinds of communities by reducing time and risk while accelerating the impact of electrification.
The Challenges Ahead
For communities to receive the full benefits of electrification, they will need coordinated cross-sectoral solutions. These include reduced energy costs, lower total energy use, decreased emissions, and lessened water use. The Center for Community Electrifications Solutions will research pathways to develop these reductions in parallel with efforts to optimize and exploit the flexibility and efficiency for the power grid, improving energy security and reliability. This research and subsequent innovations can lead to advancements in community health, safety, and productivity.
Forward-looking electrification pathways must address technology and policy challenges in a range of sectors to deliver such gains. The Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions will work toward efficient electrification solutions to address:
Distributed (local) energy generation and storage needs;
The need for local grid flexibility, adaptation, and upgrades;
The development of analytical tools to assess regional and individual electrification project needs; and
The growth of policy solutions that coordinate across sectors with the goal of reducing adoption barriers and incorporating diverse user perspectives that are tailored to local socio-economics, environmental and health conditions, and cultural concerns.
In other words, the vast majority of these common challenges towards efficient electrification are also inherently local in nature. Thus, the Center for Advancing Community Electrification Solutions believes that cross-sectoral electrification pathways must be built at the community level, one community at a time, and scaled and expanded accordingly.
Emerging Trends in AI Data Center Growth
On October 24, 2025, the Center for Advancing Community Electrification (ACES) at Lehigh University held a symposium, titled “Powering What’s Ahead: Energy and Water Challenges of AI Data Centers.” The event brought together a number of experts from a variety of sectors including academia, industry, and government to consider how Pennsylvania, and other areas, can balance the potential for innovation in AI with the need for reliable and affordable energy and water solutions.
Participants discussed a number of underlying trends influencing the energy and water challenges and opportunities posed by the growth of AI data centers during keynote presentations, panel discussions, and Q&A sessions. These converging trends include:
Load growth: After decades of stagnant load, the electricity grid started to see demand increase in the last couple of years. Due to electrification and the growth of AI data centers, the demand trend may look more like a hockey stick in the next few years. Generation, transmission, and distribution assets will need to be expanded to accommodate this load growth, while ensuring affordability and reliability for all grid users.
Aging infrastructure: Many grid assets are nearing the end of their lifespans. While this offers opportunities for new technologies to bring new efficiencies to the grid, the cost of upgrades presents challenges to energy affordability, even without load growth. At the same time, load growth spurs the need for infrastructure upgrades and investments in ways that stagnant load may not.
Grid resilience: The frequency and impact of severe weather events have increased significantly in the last two decades. These events, as well as man-made risks from cybersecurity threats, pose an emerging resiliency challenge for the electricity grid and energy systems more broadly.
Energy affordability: Currently, 1 in 6 electricity customers has difficulty paying their bills on time. Approximately 30% of US households experience some form of energy insecurity due to rising natural gas and electricity prices. Increased demand could exacerbate these issues.
Accelerated retirements: Recently, retirements of generation assets have accelerated. Some retirements are age-related and some are market-driven. But the bulk are based on policies. The pace of retirement is not keeping up with labor force growth, and new entrants are not offsetting accelerated retirement.
Price spikes: PJM, the electric grid operator for Pennsylvania and its region, has experienced large capacity price spikes recently. PJM’s capacity July 2024 auction (for delivery in 2025) cleared at roughly $270/MWh/day, up from $30/MWh/day the year before. The July 2025 auction reached the market cap of nearly $330/MWh/day. These spikes are attributed to data center demand growth and accelerated retirements of generation assets, which are not being offset by new entrants.
Energy transition: Traditional thermal and synchronous generators are being replaced by inverter-based resources (solar, wind), which exhibit greater variability and uncertainty. This complicates generation dispatchability.
AI for energy: The recent emergence of AI can improve the efficiency of energy systems. Newer technology solutions for grid operations, maintenance, forecasting, and decision-making incorporate AI- and learning-based approaches to improve system efficiency and reliability.
Electrification: Even in the absence of load growth from AI data centers, electricity demand is projected to grow in the years ahead due to electrification. The timescale for load growth from electrification is slower than the significant uptick we are currently experiencing from data centers coming online. However, both growth trends are underlying the increasing electricity demand over the next two decades.
Supply chain concerns for dispatchable generation: While expanding operationally flexible generation capacity seems like an obvious way to address load growth, there are concerns about how quickly new natural gas power plants can be brought online due to supply chain constraints. Large manufacturers of combined cycle natural gas turbines, both in the US and abroad, have their queues booked almost through 2030.
Growing complexity and power demands of server racks: Power densities of advanced AI racks have grown sharply and will continue to do so. Drawing on average 25kW-40kW two years ago, these racks now have power densities exceeding 200kW, with the aim of producing 1MW racks in the near future. The data center load growth, therefore, comes from both new data centers coming online and newer racks being integrated. Thus, for data center developers, the primary challenge is in identifying solutions to meet their expected and growing energy needs.
Power quality concerns: In addition to their high density, AI data center power demands are highly variable and nonlinear. This poses a challenge for the power quality delivered to other local grid customers. Additionally, data centers use uninterruptible power supply systems to disconnect from the grid if they sense minor disturbances. These disconnections, particularly of large-scale data centers, can pose serious challenges for the grid.
Water load growth: While the electricity grid has not seen load growth over the last several decades, regional hydropower systems have experienced similar demand ramp-ups in recent years, particularly related to shale gas drilling. Over the last 10 years, this ramp up led to improved efficiencies and environmental stewardship by drilling companies. A similar trend could be expected for the current demand growth driven by data centers. In this respect, caution is warranted to avoid over-predicting demand growth and overbuilding.
Data center water-energy trade-offs: Data centers are moving toward reduced water use due to concerns about water scarcity, even though more energy-efficient cooling systems are highly water-intensive. The industry is focusing on developing technologies that use closed-loop systems, alternative liquid cooling, or waterless innovations such as immersion cooling.
Permitting and siting challenges: Data center developers cite challenges with permitting and zoning as obstacles to the timely and scaled deployment of their infrastructure. There are also challenges for queued generation assets needed to support these infrastructures.
Fast-paced AI geopolitical race: The growth and dominance of AI technology have been positioned as the geopolitical race of our times. An all-hands-on-deck approach will be needed to compete in this race, grow national AI capacity, and build supporting infrastructures. The AI industry transforms quickly, and growth is needed at a fast pace. Innovations to address the energy and water challenges of AI data centers must align with this deployment and advancement timeline, i.e., speed to market.
