BY Jeffrey Tomich
ENERGYWIRE | In past stints as an energy developer, David Berry’s work involved finding a good spot for a solar power project or locating a pathway for a new transmission line.
Today, instead of pushing electrons onto the grid, his new company is searching for the best places to consume electricity — lots of it.
Berry, 41, is CEO and one of three co-founders of Cloverleaf Infrastructure, a Houston- and Seattle-based startup that identifies suitable locations to host data centers that can require as much power as some U.S. cities — a more challenging task as spare capacity on the power grid disappears.
The company’s very existence is a sign of the times. It speaks to the convergence of the technology and power industries and the vast amount of electricity — particularly carbon-free energy — needed to run a fleet of larger data centers in the rapidly evolving era of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
The lack of spare capacity on the power grid has data center customers with rising AI ambitions scrambling for sites where they can be up and running in a handful of years instead of a decade. That means finding new ways to plan for and procure generation.
For Berry, the venture involves applying what he learned in past careers at EDP Renewables and as a co-founder of Clean Line Energy Partners and turning it “upside down.”
“All the analysis you do, all the tricks you learn, for siting generation and figuring out where to interconnect transmission are really relevant,” Berry said.
Other co-founders are Brian Janous, who left Microsoft as vice president of energy in 2023, and Jonathan Abebe, who had served as a senior technical adviser to the Energy Department’s Loan Program Office. Officers also include a former director of energy strategy at Microsoft and the former head of land acquisition and site development at Facebook’s parent company Meta.
The company’s first and only publicly announced project so far spans 1,900 acres in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a city of 13,000 people a half-hour north of Milwaukee.
While Cloverleaf hasn’t disclosed the names of any potential tenants, the site could host one of multiple data centers requiring as much as 3.5 gigawatts of electricity, Berry said. That would make the data center campus among the largest in the nation, rivaling Meta’s planned data center campus in north-central Louisiana.
Cloverleaf was approached about the site by Wisconsin utility We Energies and a regional economic development partnership who had already studied the Port Washington site for a potential semiconductor plant, according to a story in the Milwaukee Business Journal. Meanwhile, the Cloverleaf officers who came from Microsoft had experience working on development of a data center in southeast Wisconsin and had familiarity with the market.
Cloverleaf is among a small but growing number of developers with power grid expertise who are scouring the country for the best data center sites.
Black & Veatch, a Kansas City-based energy engineering and construction company, created subsidiary Diode Ventures in 2017 that’s developing data center projects in Virginia, Idaho and in its home state of Missouri. The company recently sold a site in Minnesota to Amazon Web Services for nearly 10 times the amount it paid two years earlier.
The transaction drew the attention of Minnesota utility regulators. In a recent filing, Xcel explained that the data center market “changed dramatically” from 2022 to 2024 because of the growth of AI and the corresponding increase in the need for data storage and computing power. In fact, the utility noted that Google passed on an opportunity to locate a data center at the site prior to the land sale to Diode.
Berry, who until mid-2023 had been county administrator for Harris County, Texas, had considered starting a renewable energy company. But the clean energy industry was crowded, and Berry and his partners saw a bigger opportunity on the demand side of the ledger.
“When you have experienced hands and new eyes on a problem, it creates a real opportunity,” Berry said. “And there was a real opportunity to bring our [energy] expertise along with data center expertise and start a really impactful company.”
They saw a need to bridge the gap between the tech industry, which is lightly regulated and used to moving fast, with the utility industry, one of the most heavily regulated industries around, and one that purposefully moves at a slow pace.
Working with utilities
Berry likens the utility industry’s struggle to get comfortable with large data centers to a decade or so ago when large-scale wind and solar projects were new to most utilities. “They seemed scary,” he said. “They were variable. They were new. They required more structuring and it required work to develop trust, mutual understanding.”
It also took convincing investors that there was a looming surge in data center power needs.
Ultimately, they did. Last summer, Cloverleaf announced that it had raised $300 million in capital from NGP Energy Capital and Sandbrook Capital.
Sam Stoutner, a partner at Dallas-based NGP, said the firm first had conversations about Cloverleaf in 2023 before electricity demand from data centers was “front-page news.”
“One of the first things we had to do is convince ourselves that the load growth story, in particular around data centers, was in fact real,” Stoutner said in an interview.
NGP had previously invested in a company that develops charging sites for fleets of electric trucks and saw the same dilemma emerging with data centers — that access to power was a “binding constraint,” he said.
“It was exactly the same concept,” Stoutner said. “And in order to find and secure that power, it takes a special set of skills and people that really understand the power grid, understand how to work with utilities, understand how to structure contracts.”
Berry describes the challenge of screening suitable sites for large data centers as a complex Venn diagram where 10, 15 or more overlapping circles represent requirements for hosting a large data center. Criteria include identifying the right market, a suitable workforce, available land, transportation, fiber and energy infrastructure.
In fact, the Venn diagram sketched out in initial business plans and memos resembled a cloverleaf and helped give the company its name.
Today, Berry said, few utilities can serve a mammoth AI data center from existing capacity. “That was a strategy that worked for a long time,” Berry said. “The list of opportunities to find utilities who already have a very large reserve margin that they can just serve new loads … is very small.”
Cost issues and regulatory hurdles eventually take center stage.
“It’s in no one’s interest for grandpa and grandma’s residential electric rate to go up because there’s a new data center,” Berry said.
But neither should it take a decade to bring a project online.
“Neither of those really work for the data center industry,” he said. “So we really hope to be, and I think in some cases are proving out to be a partner to utilities, who are entrepreneurial, and say, ‘We’re willing to look at a different way of doing things. We don’t want to take a bunch of risk, but if we need to adapt, we’re willing to.’”
‘Back to the future’
Though it has been decades since the utility industry has seen significant demand growth, it’s not unprecedented.
“In some sense it’s going back to the future,” Berry said. “We’re going back to a time when the utility industry, the electricity industry, is an engine of growth.”
A key difference between the economic growth driving electricity demand 50 years ago and today: climate change.
Governments, tech companies and the utilities that supply them power have pledged to slash greenhouse gas emissions, a goal that some environmental advocates believe is threatened by the sharp increase in electricity demand from data center development.
While Cloverleaf is focused on providing large electricity users with clean power sources such as wind, solar and short-duration battery storage, resources that Berry characterizes as “under-deployed,” natural gas is also likely to continue to play a role, he said.
“Matching wind and solar with batteries on a 24-7 basis is challenging and gets really expensive,” Berry said. “We don’t have the perfect solution right now for 24/7 matching for carbon-free power.”
Other technologies such as advanced geothermal and small modular nuclear reactors are all going to be needed, but it will take time to develop supply chains and deploy them at scale.
“Let’s go deploy what we have with as much speed, at the greatest scale, with the highest sustainability possible,” he said. “And then let’s also keep working on the next generation of technologies that will give us more options.”
“We can’t press pause when we develop technology,” Berry said. “We just have to walk and chew gum at the same time.”