DATA CENTRE ENERGY MANAGEMENT IN SMART GRIDS

Increased environmental awareness, desire of tapping renewable resources, vast integration of distributed
resources into the distribution grids and most importantly low-cost and accessible communication
infrastructure changed the traditional structure of the electrical power systems. Conventional power systems
are vertically integrated and divided into three main sections. These are; generation, transmission and
distribution systems. In that configuration electricity produced by big power stations and transmitted through
a meshed power lines and distributed using radially configured distribution systems. In vertically integrated
classical power systems demand fluctuations are compensated by dispatching reserve generation resources
using unit commitment technics. The contemporary power systems, on the other hand, bares a great
hindrance due to fact that, renewable based distributed generators are not dispatchable and cannot be
considered for unit commitment problems. Thanks to the smart grid technologies, intermittent nature of the
renewable resources can be compensated through dispatching demand. These actions are called as demand
side participation or management and is simply implemented by dispatching the load instead of generation.
One of the dispatchable loads are consumed electricity of the data centres which is exponentially increasing.
Significant amount of electricity utilization, readily available communication infrastructure, fluctuating
nature of work load and most importantly thermal inertia that is provided by extensive cooling need of data
centres make them a promising candidate for demand side management application.
In this paper, brief information on a newly started EU H2020 project "Sustainable energy demand side
management for GREEN Data Centers-GREENDC" aiming developing a tool for measurement of demand
side participation capability of data centres will be presented.