Operation of datacenter as virtual power plant

Abstract

Datacenters are becoming a significant energy consumer and ideal candidates to operate as virtual power plant (VPP). 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 paper presents a new method to operate a datacenter as a virtual power plant and participate in the power market. A benchmark for datacenters to operate as VPP was developed and two different cases were analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.