“We see energy storage as an opportunity for (data centres) to reduce their impact on the grid”, said Patrick Hughes, Senior Vice President of Operations and Strategy at NEMA.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) recently published two guidance papers on data centre design considerations for energy storage systems (ESS) and microgrids.
The standards developing organisation and trade association, celebrating its 100-year anniversary, publishes and maintains standards for electrical technologies.
Additionally, NEMA has a government relations team responsible for engaging with state, federal, and international governments, as well as managing regulatory activities. It also features a business intelligence unit that conducts market research and provides reports for its members.
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NEMA’s two guides focus on essential infrastructure aspects for data centres. The Energy Storage Systems guide discusses the technical, operational, and regulatory factors involved in integrating battery storage.
The Microgrid Energy Integration guide emphasises deploying AC microgrids that include local generation, storage, and control systems. According to NEMA, these tools assist developers, engineers, and facility managers in assessing technology options, optimising system design, increasing uptime, reducing costs, and ensuring safety and performance standards are met.
Creating the guidance
Hughes says the guides came about because NEMA heard from its members that the rush to build data centres was resulting in incorrect installations and misuse of products.
“So, we said we should come up with guidance for key aspects of a data centre to make sure that the equipment is being installed and operated safely and in an energy-efficient way, so that they can use less energy, generate or store their own electricity, and reduce the impact on the grid. We started publishing these design consideration documents for data centre developers, architects, and engineers, to give them that guidance”, Hughes notes.
Integrating energy storage and data centres
An opportunity for interconnection has presented itself through energy storage. Hughes explains, “Data centres want to build, they’re getting into the interconnection queues, and they’re being told that they have to wait or they’re not being approved. We see energy storage as an opportunity for them to reduce their impact on the grid and speed up their process in the interconnection queue because they’re able to shave their peak.”
He further explains that data centres often consume the most electricity during new algorithm training. By utilising energy storage, the data centre can draw from non-grid sources, even partially, to lessen its load.
Hughes says, “We see energy storage as interesting to data centre developers from that standpoint, reducing your peak demand, but also they have very high reliability needs, and wanting to have backup storage on site so that if there’s a grid disruption, you can keep your data centre operations going.”
These ideas are already being embraced by energy storage and data centre developers.
In October 2025, Calibrant Energy announced its plan to install a 31MW/62MWh BESS at Aligned Data Centres’ campus in Hillsboro, Oregon. Aligned stated that this will be the first BESS designed specifically to speed up interconnection processes and enable the launch of a large-scale data centre.
Calibrant’s CCO, Matt Barnes, speaking with Energy-Storage.news Premium about this project in December, stated, “The data centre is already built but was waiting on utility power that was potentially years out. The BESS enables [utility] PGE to serve the customer in a more accelerated time frame, because the delays were about the data centres’ load during peak hours. The BESS will essentially make the data centre a more flexible form of load,” Barnes said.
“The site got its initial power earlier this year, and now the BESS will be built and enable it to ramp up to full power. That ramp-up period is fairly normal for data centres anyway.”
The Energy Storage Summit USA will be held from 24-25 March 2026, in Dallas, TX. It features keynote speeches and panel discussions on topics like FEOC challenges, power demand forecasting, and managing the BESS supply chain. ESN Premium subscribers receive an exclusive discount on tickets. For complete information, visit the Energy Storage Summit USA website.