Mukesh Khattar is a technical executive from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), a non-profit organization funded by the American electric utility industry. In this video, he shares some of the ideas discussed during Energy Smart, a one day event that took place in the run up to the DCD Webscale conference in San Francisco.

Khattar comes from a utility background, and describes the data center industry as divided between ‘south of the meter’ - the familiar world of servers - and ‘north of the meter,’ where power generation and transmission are taking place. The two sides have to work together if the demands of industry are to continue to be met.

He adds that those from the south of the meter also have detailed knowledge of locations that offer an abundance of power, as well as those where power grids are already strained.

Khattar believes that the future of data center power will be defined by hyperscale facilities, and that a lot of demand for that power will come from resource-hungry AI workloads. Meanwhile edge computing will put more emphasis on power availability in remote locations.

He also suggests that overall data center power consumption worldwide might actually grow faster than we expect.