Why is behind-the-meter power important in the age of AI data centres?
Demand for power has gone off the scale as the data centre sector has exploded, and the public grid can’t keep pace. Wait times for connections have risen towards the better part of a decade in some places, while much grid infrastructure needs upgrading.
Big tech is not going to wait amid this AI gold rush, with power acting as the ‘picks and shovels’ that everyone needs. Behind-the-meter power is important now because it comprises systems that can operate independently of the grid, offering much-needed options in a potentially quicker timeframe.
What are some of the main behind-the-meter options and the trends with those?
Currently, the trend is being driven mainly by the US, where big tech is rapidly running out of power options.
Gas turbines for self-contained microgrids are often sold out for years, while nuclear power is unlikely to scale significantly before the mid-2030s.
Consequently, the sector is increasingly turning to gas-fired medium-speed reciprocating engines. Our Norway-based company, Bergen Engines, acquired from Rolls-Royce in 2021, has built these engines for 80 years, making it a proven technology now seeing unprecedented demand from the data centre sector.
Can you describe a bit more about the power offering of your company, Langley Holdings, and how it works?
Bergen Engines, our Power Solutions division, includes Italy’s Marelli Motori and Germany’s Piller Power Systems.
Marelli Motori makes the alternators fitted to Bergen’s 12.5MW engines, the building blocks of our modular system scalable to 500+ MW. These can run on natural gas, LPG and up to 25% hydrogen blends. For now, abundant natural gas in places like Texas is driving the boom in AI factories and data centre campuses there.
A key differentiator is integrating Piller’s stabilisation technology, which manages the power fluctuations of AI workloads and supports the 99.999% uptime required in tier-IV data centres.
Piller protects mission-critical infrastructure including the Bank of England, the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve and the CIA. Last year, we relaunched the technology as SHIELDXTM for data centres.
What trends are you seeing in demand for Langley’s engines?
The massive demand is reflected in the speed with which we’ve been ramping up production at our subsidiaries. Late last year, we ordered 100 SHIELDXTM units from Piller, later increasing this to 200 and then 300. They’re all now sold and we’ve placed another 300-unit order.
As an example of a sizeable deal, we recently gained an order for more than 500MW of capacity for large-scale AI data centre deployment in the US from Liberty Energy, which is diversifying from its traditional onshore oil and gas services businesses into the data centre sector.
Meanwhile, in line with our growth, we should be producing 1GW of power by some time this year and 2GW per year by 2028.
How do you see the future of behind-the-meter systems?
Though the vast majority of today’s interest is in the US, I would ultimately expect these systems to become a feature of every other region unless they ramp up their grid capacity substantially.
Another indication of how this is going is that it doesn’t seem 5 minutes since my two sons and I were in Cannes for last year’s Datacloud Global Congress, when we showcased Langley’s grid-free technology and Bergen signed its first AI data centre deal. I said to them: “This AI thing is big, and we need to find out for ourselves what’s going on.” The amount of interest we saw there was incredible, and we even got dubbed ‘the power guys’.
The massive growth we’ve since seen in the sector means that Langley is now principally a power equipment supplier. Other industries we’re involved in are still important, but activities elsewhere are being dwarfed by the AI gold rush.
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