This week in buildings, land and industry decarbonization news, James Downing wrote about a new effort from the Electric Power Research Institute to help data centers offer flexibility to the grid: the “DCFlex” initiative. Born out of discussions with DOE, the effort will coordinate flexibility demonstrations at different facilities around the country. In addition to providing services from the grid, flexibility can help data centers get service more quickly as it can help them avoid raising peak demands, which can lead to reliability issues in some parts of the system.

NetZero Insider’s K Kaufmann was also covering data centers through a United States Energy Association event. The sheer size of some proposals, with firms talking about 1 GW of demand from single facilities is an issue, but the event looked into alternatives to those “hyperscale” data centers. 

In other news, The New York Times offers a rundown of recent studies on the health impacts of natural gas stoves. One study out of Spain claimed they lead to 40,000 premature deaths per year in Europe as they emit nitrogen oxides and benzene that impact human health. A key to mitigating their impact is ventilation. 

The Breakthrough Institute posted a blog arguing that solar farms being built on land that could also be used for agricultural production will not lead to food shortages. The biggest cause of the loss of farmland is urban sprawl, which makes the land useless for farmers for much longer than a solar lease. Solar is also competing with crops grown for biofuels, which currently take up 5.8% of total agricultural land while dispersing a small amount of oil demand. 

Colorado is one of the latest states to start taking advantage of home energy retrofit funding from the Inflation Reduction Act, Colorado Newsline reported. The funds will help an existing state program that served 4,000 Coloradans last year. The state is getting $7.6 million to start, but the feds will eventually give it a total of $140 million from the IRA. 

Here are other stories from this week’s Intelligence Report: