Watch: Preparing California’s Energy Grid for New Load Sources at Scale

June 16, 2025 | CCST Newsroom, Events, Expert Briefings

Description

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As electrification rapidly expands across sectors, electric utilities face growing pressure to scale grid capacity to meet surging demand, particularly from electric vehicles (EVs), electrified buildings, and high-load data centers. This panel examines the specific challenges and opportunities facing California as it prepares its grid and infrastructure for this dramatic shift in electricity demand.

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Recap: Quick Notes

On the importance of flexible EV charging for managing grid loads: “Flexible EV charging is something that is so critical to be locking into now, as people are developing habits and expectations around when they get to fill up their EV, we need to be getting people to think about the issue. You don’t have to charge at home in a three hour window. It’s okay to move around when that charging is happening. And that’s going to have enormous dividends in terms of enabling us to navigate the infrastructure challenge, which we can separate from the energy delivery challenge.”

— Duncan Callaway, PhD, UC Berkeley / Berkeley Lab

On opportunities to lower costs through better grid utilization: “What I’m mostly worried about is how do we get there? What we see in the light duty is that we have a very limited range for rate hikes. If driving electric will be more expensive than driving gas, cars, hybrids or others, we will not be able to meet the goals, the state goals of of electrification, not in the light duty and not in the heavy duty.”

— Gil Tal, PhD, UC Davis Electric Vehicle Research Center

On the rapid growth of data center demand and EPRI’s DC Flex Initiative: “Data centers averaged about 20MW a few years ago, then up to 40MW. Now their requests for interconnection today are approaching 1GW, 2GW, and larger. So that’s the size of Minneapolis in terms of demand. If you’re at 2GW, quite large, one of the keys looking towards powering these data centers, just like with EVs, is flexibility.”

— Tom Wilson, PhD, EPRI / Former White House Advisor

On a solutions-oriented approach with tools like EPRI’s eRoadMAP and GridFAST: “The most important thing we can do for utilities is to drive confidence in where and when the loads are coming, so that we can accelerate grid readiness and accelerate those interconnections on behalf of those customers with those loads. EPRI’s done a couple things in this EV scale initiative. Over the last two years, we have developed four important tools. We are very solution focused. What do we need to introduce into the market for customers and for utilities to work better together to plan?”

— Britta Gross, EPRI