Speed to Power vs Net Zero: The Data Center Dilemma - Clarke Energy

**Alejandro De Diego** (0:03)
Imagine opening a restaurant in a busy city, but the electricity company tells you the kitchen won't be connected for another three years. What a nightmare. Customers still arrive tomorrow, so what do you do? You rent generators, park them behind the building, and start cooking anyway. That's increasingly what the data center boom looks like. Every data center being built right now needs power immediately, not when the grid connection finally arrives. DatGap has created a market, and the technology filling it isn't new. It's the old school gas engine. Modular, fast to deploy, fast to start. The same reciprocating engines that have powered factories, cars and hospitals for decades. What has now changed is the scale. Five years ago, a 20-megawatt distributed generation project was considered large. Now, Clarke Energy is working on 200-megawatt data center installations in the US and a 450-megawatt peaking station outside London, where banks of gas engines sit idle until wind drops and a grid calls for back up. Houston, we have a problem. But speed to power and recoverization don't always pull in the same direction. As my guest today puts it, the engineering department and the sustainability department don't always speak the same language. Alex Marshall is VP of Business Development at Clarke Energy, with three decades across biogas, combined heat and power and flexible grid support. This episode isn't about whether gas has a future. It's about who controls the power when the grid can't. I'm Alejandro De Diego, filling in for Ed Porter. Welcome back to Transmission.
Alex, thank you very much for joining us today to Transmission, our podcast. Can you first start by introducing yourself, what your role is within the energy industry, and what Clarke Energy does?

**Alex Marshall** (2:06)
Yeah, thank you, Alex. So yeah, I'm Alex Marshall. I've been with Clarke Energy 18 years. Originally a biologist and moved in through strange route in the waste management sector, developing waste treatment technologies, which had a biogas output. And that biogas output is used in gas engines. And I worked my way through Clarke Energy many years, relocating here to the US almost four years ago now. I am a vice president of the COGEN World Coalition, and I sit on the Council of the World Biogas Association. So Clarke Energy, we are the distributed energy specialist, part of RELCO. RELCO is what was COLA Energy. And we focus on resilient, distributed energy solutions. So from a Clarke Energy perspective, 30 years experience, we've seen the industry of local power, ride a series of waves, whether that is the landfill sector, the biogas sector, combined heat and power, more recently flexible generation for grid support, in Australia, remote power for mining. And then as we're here, obviously the big exciting topic is data centers.
We've been working on data centers for 10 years now. And we're excited to see some really exciting projects coming through.

**Alejandro De Diego** (3:22)
And when you work with the new clients, do you usually focus on some technologies? Do you look at all of the technology spectrum of power generation?

**Alex Marshall** (3:31)
So our core business, we are the largest distributor of Ineos Yambacher gas engines, which is an Austrian gas engine. That kind of forms the nucleus of most of the projects we work on. However, one of my roles in Clarke Energy is to support the transition to new technologies for us. So what we do if you're talking from a client perspective, we ask the client, what are your energy needs? What's your electrical demand, your cooling or thermal demand? And then we would map on a solution to match that requirement. If we start to add levels of complexity, we can start to then look at, say to the customer, well, the energy trilemma, what's important to you? Is it cost? Is it carbon emissions? Or is it resilience or availability?
And you can develop a hybrid solution with that trilemma, that triangle, to give the optimal solution for the customer. So, for example, we could integrate batteries or we could integrate on-site generation of hydrogen. We could do a microgrid control system. We could put in solar and bolt these together based upon what the customer requires. And that's, we have some specific suppliers and then for other scopes of work, we are agnostic. We'll go in, we're a life of asset provider, so EPC, engineer, procure and construct, but then with maintenance. So we'll give an interest in the facility for maybe 10, 15 years into the future.

**Alejandro De Diego** (4:51)
You have been at the front of hyperscales data centers, as you mentioned right now and recently in the US as well. Has there been a sheer moment when you realized the boom that was coming with a specific project or a certain year? And what did it translate to in your daily operations or your strategy for Clarke Energy?