Podcast: How manufacturers are adapting to new power demands in the U.S.

Christopher Butler is president of embedded and critical power businesses at Flex. In his current position, Christopher leads teams delivering products and intellectual property to address escalating power consumption for data centers and other markets, as well as critical power in and around facilities. Nikki Chandler is group editorial director for T&D World, EnergyTech and Microgrid Knowledge. Nikki has 28 years of experience as an award-winning B2B editor, with 23 years of it covering the electric utility industry. Sara Jensen is executive editor of Power & Motion, directing expanded coverage into the modern fluid power space, as well as mechatronic and smart technologies. She has over 15 years of publishing experience. Matt Vincent is editor-in-chief of Data Center Frontier. Matt is a B2B technology journalist and editor with more than two decades of experience. Christopher, Nikki, Sara, and Matt recently spoke with IndustryWeek editor in chief Robert Schoenberger about the country’s rapidly growing demand for electricity and how that's affecting the manufacturing world.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

IW: As I mentioned at the start, the country is really hungry for power right now. We’ve had several years of flat electrical use as energy efficiency programs took place nationwide and appliances got more efficient, plants got more efficient, and lighting improved. But in the past few years, we've had this growth of AI, which drives data centers. We've had electric vehicles. We've had a lot of other components coming in that are now driving this increased demand for electricity, and that's driving some manufacturing moves. Chris, if you can, tell us a little bit about what Flex announced this morning and why it was so necessary for you guys to invest in Dallas.

CB: First of all, thanks for inviting me. I know it was a little last minute, but we do have some exciting news about some investments that we are making in Dallas. And really, if you just step back a second and start looking at what's going on in the data centers today, the use of [graphics processing units] GPUs rising in the data center is really having a significant impact on the consumption of power. And people can't keep up. It doesn't matter how you do the math. When you look at the increase in GPU utilization, we expect to see somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three times the amount of energy consumption in a data center of the future. And with that, we have customers that are really in need of additional capacity.

So, here in the U.S., we've been making a number of investments. One notable one was back in November. We bought a company called Crown Technical Systems. What Crown does is they build what we like to call power pods. What a power pod is, we take all of the electrical equipment that’s required for a data center, and we put it all into one building. This has a number of key benefits for customers, but mainly it helps them keep on schedule. It’s been a real struggle getting enough labor to even build these data centers, and we’re able to do that in a controlled environment and then ship it to our customer’s site.

That acquisition was the reason why we invested in Dallas. Crown had a small facility in the Dallas market. We are expanding it like crazy. So, we just announced that we’re opening a 400,000-square-foot site. This site is going to be where we produce power pods, so this will be a significant expansion of our manufacturing footprint here in the U.S. for not only power pods, but also all the equipment that goes inside. So, things like low-voltage switch gear and medium-voltage switch gear. This will be a one-stop-shop for our data center customers, and it’s sitting right in the middle of the country. So, it’s really easy to take these huge buildings and ship them wherever they need to go.

IW: We've also been talking about Eaton Corp., which just last week announced a plant investment in South Carolina. Schneider Electric has been spending money too. This need to update the grid, modernize the grid, have more power flowing through it, not just because of an aging grid, but because of this increased demand is really driving a lot of change in these markets right now. Let me turn it over to you, Nikki, because you're the one who deals with a lot of that, with your knowledge and your focus on the utility world. Do you know a little bit about what's been driving some of this? We mentioned data centers. What else is driving this growth of power demand in the U.S.?

NC: Well, you know, it's data centers. That's the big story, the big news that we've been hearing about, but also the onshoring of manufacturing. And of course, we've all been watching the chaos that's been happening in the last couple of weeks of tariffs, maybe happening, maybe not. But even with all of that, you're kind of seeing in the future that, even with the Biden administration, there was that emphasis on getting some of that manufacturing back to the U.S. to really solidify and guarantee the supply chain for all of the things that we need for power, which would be the transformers, switch gear, all the components of the substations all the way to the meter. So, that’s definitely another big factor.

We saw a big shift right after COVID when everybody went to work from home. And so utilities were trying to deal with ‘where is that load at?’ And so now it's a new story. We kind of know where some of those loads are coming from, but the question is ‘how are we going to meet that?’ And then the other big one, of course, is the electrification of everything, not just EVs, which maybe slowing down a little bit, but still going. But electrification of everything in your house. So those are the big, big drivers for the need for more capacity.

IW: We've written a lot about the data center side of things just because so much is on the cloud. So much is AI driven these days. And as Chris mentioned, the GPUs, the NVIDIA chips, they use a lot of power, especially when you stream them together in these bigger rays. Matt, if you could maybe address that a little bit from the Data Center Frontier point of view. You write a lot about data centers. How are data centers dealing with this need for more power?

MV: We can’t talk about data centers these days without talking about AI, as you note. I just wanted to hit you with a couple of data points on the power side. To echo sort of what Nikki was talking about, just in 2025, the global data center industry is expected to initiate 10 gigawatts of new capacity globally across the hyperscale and colocation segments. So, 10 gigawatts is a lot in just a year. And with the data center industry expansion that's undergoing right now, AI’s impact on power demand is just really putting the charts into that hockey stick mode. It was almost like a running joke talking about that hockey stick chart, that's going off the top of the graph. Goldman Sachs research estimates that AI could lead to a 160% increase in data center power consumption, adding approximately 200 terawatt hours by 2030. So if you believe what Goldman Sachs says, that's reflective of other numbers that we've seen in the industry.

About the Podcast
Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast offers news and information for the people who make, store and move things and those who manage and maintain the facilities where that work gets done. Manufacturers from chemical producers to automakers to machine shops can listen for critical insights into the technologies, economic conditions and best practices that can influence how to best run facilities to reach operational excellence.