Delta Electronics Inc (台達電) yesterday said it plans to step up investment in microgrid solutions over the next few years as it expands its energy infrastructure business.
Delta had mainly focused on improving the energy efficiency of individual products, but it has shifted toward optimizing energy efficiency at the system level in the past few years, company chairman Ping Cheng (鄭平) said at the company’s 55th sustainability summit in Taoyuan.
Rising electricity demand from artificial intelligence data centers, factories and other buildings is making power supply and demand increasingly complex, underscoring the importance of microgrids, which help optimize electricity usage and boost supply resilience, Cheng said.
Photo: Meryl Kau, Taipei Times
A microgrid is a localized power system that integrates power generation, energy storage and energy management systems to supply and manage electricity for facilities such as data centers and factories. It can operate alongside the main power grid while helping users manage peak demand, improve power stability and maintain operations during grid disruptions.
Delta has begun providing power grid-related services to power plants in Taiwan and overseas, said Guo Shan-shan (郭珊珊), Delta’s chief brand officer and vice chairwoman of the Delta Electronics Foundation.
As large-scale AI data center operators in the US are required to build in-house power plants, demand for microgrids would increase from that market, Guo said.
The key challenges are to determine what supporting infrastructure is needed for microgrid deployment, she said.
For example, solid-state transformers (SSTs) can significantly reduce the number of voltage conversion stages in a power system, but require a different power architecture from conventional systems, she added.
Adoption could accelerate once the benefits of such technologies outweigh the costs and barriers of upgrading power infrastructure, Guo said.
SSTs have already been widely adopted in China, where Delta has shipped products to several customers, as newly built infrastructure makes it easier to adopt new power architectures, she said.
Major cloud service providers in the US are also testing SSTs, with more progress expected next year, she said.
Power stability and resilience remain key challenges for AI data centers, which could increasingly integrate SSTs, hydrogen fuel cells, energy storage and energy management systems, Delta general manager of Taiwan sales Daniel Chang (張立業) said.
As AI infrastructure expands, computing capacity and power supply would need to be planned together, taking into account power availability, quality and resilience, Delta Data Center Segment Business Unit general manager Richard Chan (詹智強) said.
Microgrids can support on-site power generation and power management for data centers while improving supply stability and reducing transmission and distribution losses by managing energy closer to where it is consumed, Chan said.
Such applications could also extend to other power-intensive facilities, including an AI data center that Delta helped an IC design company build in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼), with the facility having about 18 megawatts of capacity, Chang said.
Delta yesterday also unveiled an AI liquid-cooling validation center, a 3,306m2 laboratory with 7-megawatt testing capacity for liquid-to-liquid and liquid-to-air cooling systems, as well as a centralized control center that monitors customers’ energy storage systems around the clock to ensure stable operation of microgrid projects.
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