Operation of Datacenters as Virtual Power Plants

Datacenters are becoming a significant energy consumer and ideal candidates to operate as virtual power plants (VPP). The VPP is a software system which effectively connects, coordinates and monitors decentralized power-generating sites, a storage facility and controllable load by using common energy management system. In order to provide reliable power, datacenters are provided with on-site generators and large backup resources. These resources are designed to provide power during grid failure, therefore they are underutilized most of the time. In addition, load demand of the datacenter is flexible and the datacenter’s resources are designed to meet the peak load. Resource use during average load conditions is very low and they remain idle. These characteristics make datacenters ideal candidates for VPP. This thesis presents a new method to operate a datacenter as a VPP and participate in the power market. A benchmark of 100 MW Tier-IV datacenter having 50MW of wind generation, 50 MW of solar generation and 192 MWhr of battery bank that will provide one hour of backup to entire datacenter was developed. The resources of the datacenter were operated depending upon the grid request. Two different cases were analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method