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Across the board, participants said the devices and systems needed to shift electricity use in response to grid conditions already exist or are close to ready. What's missing is clarity on how rates will be structured, what technical standards devices must meet, and whether state agencies have the political will and staffing to enforce any of it.

The paper, published this month in the ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, compares seven cooling strategies — from traditional air systems to direct-to-chip (D2C) liquid cooling and full immersion tanks — across energy efficiency, compute density, retrofit difficulty, cost, and environmental impact.

Researchers at UC Davis’s Western Cooling Efficiency Center (WCEC) have designed a modular data center for AI computing that packs 1.5 megawatts of computing power into the volume of a standard 40-foot shipping container—and keeps it cool without energy-intensive compressor-based systems. Better still, the sealed-loop design rejects heat directly to the air, consuming no water at all.

Typical ventilation controllers are programmed only for energy savings. For example, a demand-control ventilation system with economizer cooling will pull in outdoor air whenever it’s cool enough to give the compressor a break—but it has no idea what’s in that air. On a smoky day, the system will do its job and lower indoor temperatures while filling the building with PM2.5 from wildfire smoke. Traditional controllers simply can’t tell the difference.