Data Centre Titans: When the Grid Becomes the Bottleneck – Adam Wray-Summerson

AI-ready data centres are placing new pressure on power strategy.

In this Data Centre Titans interview, Adam Wray-Summerson, Technical Sales Director at Clarke Energy, a Rehlko Company, discusses how power availability, resilience, and distributed energy systems are influencing infrastructure decisions as demand for AI capacity grows.

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What is your role today, and how did you arrive at this point in your career?

Today, I serve as Technical Sales Director at Clarke Energy, a Rehlko Company, where I focus on helping some of the world’s most energy-intensive organisations develop resilient, efficient, and sustainable power infrastructure solutions. Increasingly, that means working with data centre developers and operators, alongside the investors supporting them as they navigate unprecedented growth in computing demand.

My career has always sat at the intersection of energy, technology, and infrastructure. I have worked across conventional power generation, distributed energy systems, battery energy storage, hydrogen technologies, and the rapidly evolving data centre sector. I have also had the opportunity to work across multiple international markets, including the UK, Ireland, the United States and Africa.

What has remained constant throughout my journey is the importance of reliable energy. Every major economic transformation has been underpinned by access to reliable energy, and today’s AI-driven digital revolution is no different. Data centres have become critical national infrastructure, and ensuring they have access to resilient and scalable energy systems is one of the defining challenges of our time.

Your career has spanned power generation, battery storage, hydrogen, and data centre energy. What has that journey taught you about the relationship between energy and digital infrastructure?

The biggest lesson is that digital infrastructure and energy infrastructure are now inseparable.

For many years, power was viewed as a utility input for data centres, with the expectation that it would simply be available when needed. That’s no longer the case. Today, access to power is often the primary constraint on where and when new data centres can be built.

As digitalisation accelerates and AI drives exponential growth in computing demand, energy is moving from being a supporting consideration to becoming a strategic differentiator. The operators that can secure power while balancing resilience, cost, and sustainability will have a significant competitive advantage.

My experience across different energy technologies has also taught me that there is no single solution. The future will require an integrated approach that combines grid connections, flexible generation, biomethane, battery storage, microgrids, demand management and, in time, emerging technologies such as hydrogen. Success will come from intelligently orchestrating these technologies rather than relying on any one of them.

As AI drives demand for new data centre capacity, how do you see operators responding to growing power constraints?

We are already seeing a fundamental shift in mindset.

Historically, operators would identify a site and then secure a grid connection. However, increasingly the starting point is the availability of power. In many regions, particularly in the UK and parts of Europe, grid connection timelines can extend for several years, creating a significant barrier to growth. As a result, operators are becoming much more proactive and innovative.

In some cases, developers are now bringing forward the energy strategy; before the data centre design itself, recognising that access to power has become the critical path for delivering new capacity.

The “AI-boom” is amplifying this challenge because modern workloads require far greater power densities than traditional enterprise computing. Facilities are now planning for power requirements that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago.

The operators that succeed will be those who view energy strategy as a core part of their business strategy rather than simply an engineering requirement.

What’s driving the growing interest in distributed energy, battery storage, and microgrids?

It comes down to three factors: speed, resilience, and economics.

Firstly, organisations need power faster than many utilities can currently provide it. Distributed energy solutions can significantly accelerate deployment while reducing dependence on network upgrades.

Secondly, resilience has become more important than ever. Outages are extremely costly for data centres, and operators need greater control over their energy supply. Well-designed microgrids offer an additional layer of security and operational flexibility.

Finally, economics are becoming increasingly compelling. Energy price volatility, grid connection costs, and the growing value of flexibility services have highlighted the benefits of battery storage and distributed energy assets.

Together, these drivers are moving distributed energy from a niche concept to a mainstream component of data centre infrastructure planning.

What role will energy resilience play in enabling the next generation of AI-ready data centres?

Energy resilience will be fundamental.

As AI workloads become more critical to business operations, downtime becomes even less acceptable. We are moving towards a world where data centres underpin everything from financial systems and healthcare applications to autonomous technologies and national AI capabilities.

That means resilience can no longer be defined solely by backup power systems. It must encompass the entire energy ecosystem.

Future AI-ready facilities will require layered resilience strategies that integrate grid infrastructure, onsite generation, battery storage, intelligent controls, and predictive energy management. Operators will need the ability to adapt dynamically to changing conditions while maintaining uninterrupted performance.

In many respects, energy resilience is becoming just as important as computing resilience. Critically, these two elements must be considered alongside each other and not in isolation to enable the AI-ready data centre.

Which emerging energy technologies do you believe will have the greatest impact on the future of digital infrastructure?

In the near term, I believe battery energy storage systems (BESS) and advanced microgrid controls will have the most immediate impact on the data centre sector.

Whilst batteries are often discussed in the context of energy arbitrage or backup power, their role is becoming significantly more sophisticated. BESS can provide the fast-acting voltage and frequency stabilisation required to create and maintain a stable isolated grid, effectively acting as the “shock absorber” within a microgrid architecture.

As power demand from AI workloads becomes increasingly dynamic, batteries can respond in milliseconds to fluctuations in load, generation, or grid conditions. This helps maintain power quality and stability whilst ensuring critical IT equipment receives a consistent supply of electricity. Within a microgrid, BESS can also help manage the distribution of power into the data centre from an energy centre comprising utility connections, on-site generation, renewable energy sources or standby generation assets. By smoothing transient events, balancing load changes, and supporting black-start capability, batteries become an enabler of both resilience and operational flexibility.

Looking further ahead, I see biomethane and hydrogen playing increasingly important roles in the evolution of data centre energy infrastructure.

Biomethane is particularly attractive because it is available today, commercially proven and can be used within existing gas infrastructure and generation technologies. As operators seek to reduce the carbon intensity of their facilities whilst maintaining the levels of resilience that the sector demands, biomethane-fuelled generation provides a practical pathway to lower-emission onsite power and microgrid solutions. Unlike some emerging technologies that require entirely new supply chains, biomethane can be deployed now as part of an incremental decarbonisation strategy.

Hydrogen presents significant long-term potential, particularly for low-carbon dispatchable generation and long-duration energy storage. There is still work to be done around infrastructure development, economics, and scalability, but hydrogen is likely become a key component of future resilient energy ecosystems.

I’m equally excited by the increasing application of artificial intelligence (AI) within energy management itself. AI-driven optimisation platforms will enable operators to coordinate generation assets, batteries, cooling systems and grid interactions in real time, maximising efficiency whilst maintaining resilience.

The future is not simply about generating more power. Instead, it is about creating intelligent energy ecosystems that can deliver reliable and increasingly sustainable power exactly where and when it is needed.

As Chair of the REA’s Data Centre Coalition, what do you think the industry needs to do better to tackle future energy challenges?

The biggest opportunity is greater collaboration.

The pace of data centre growth means energy challenges cannot be solved independently. It requires closer collaboration between data centre operators, energy developers, network operators, regulators, and government. The scale of demand forecast over the next decade requires an ecosystem response rather than isolated solutions.

There also needs to be a recognition that data centres are not simply large energy consumers. They can become active participants in the energy system through demand flexibility, distributed generation, storage, and grid support services.

From a policy perspective, we need clearer long-term frameworks that encourage investment in energy infrastructure while accelerating planning and grid connection processes.

The challenge is not whether we can build enough computing capacity or enough power infrastructure independently. The challenge is ensuring they evolve together while strengthening the wider energy system.

Having worked across the UK, Ireland, the US and Africa, what lessons can the industry learn from different approaches to energy infrastructure?

One thing I have learned is that innovation often emerges where constraints are greatest.

In parts of Africa, for example, organisations have long relied on self-generation and microgrid solutions because grid reliability cannot always be taken for granted. As a result, many businesses have developed sophisticated approaches to resilience and energy independence.

In contrast, more mature markets have historically benefitted from stronger utility networks but are now encountering their own challenges as electricity demand accelerates.

The key lesson is that resilience, flexibility, and diversity of supply matter everywhere. Different regions may adopt different approaches, but the most successful strategies are those that avoid overreliance on a single energy pathway.

The future energy landscape is likely to be more decentralised and more flexible than the systems many of us grew up with.

Looking ahead, what’s one bold prediction you would make about the future of energy infrastructure for data centres?

My bold prediction is that within the next decade, many large data centres will become energy hubs, operating integrated, sophisticated microgrids that generate, store, optimise, and trade electricity.

Energy infrastructure will become as strategically important as computing infrastructure. In fact, when selecting sites, evaluating investments or planning expansions, access to flexible energy may become a greater differentiator than access to fibre connectivity.

The AI revolution will undoubtedly transform the digital economy, but its success will depend on something much more fundamental: our ability to deliver resilient, scalable, and intelligent energy systems at an unprecedented scale.