Not All Doom and Gloom : How Energy-Intensive and Temporally Flexible Data Center Applications May Actually Promote Renewable Energy Sources

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Fridgen, Gilbert ; Körner, Marc-Fabian ; Walters, Steffen ; Weibelzahl, Martin:
Not All Doom and Gloom : How Energy-Intensive and Temporally Flexible Data Center Applications May Actually Promote Renewable Energy Sources.
In: Business & Information Systems Engineering. Bd. 63 (2021) Heft 3 . - S. 243-256.
ISSN 1867-0202
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-021-00686-z

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Abstract

To achieve a sustainable energy system, a further increase in electricity generation from renewa-ble energy sources (RES) is imperative. However, the development and implementation of RES entail various challenges, e.g., dealing with grid stability issues due to RES’ intermittency. Corre-spondingly, increasingly volatile and even negative electricity prices question the economic via-bility of RES-plants. To address these challenges, this paper analyzes how the integration of an RES-plant and a computationally intensive, energy-consuming data center (DC) can promote investments in RES-plants. An optimization model is developed that calculates the net present value (NPV) of an integrated energy system (IES) comprising an RES-plant and a DC, where the DC may directly consume electricity from the RES-plant. To gain applicable knowledge, this paper evaluates the developed model by two use-cases with real-world data, namely AWS com-puting instances for training Machine Learning algorithms and Bitcoin mining as relevant DC-applications. The results illustrate that for both cases the NPV of the IES compared to a stand-alone RES-plant increases, which may lead to a promotion of RES-plants. The evaluation also finds that the IES may be able to provide significant energy flexibility that can be used to stabi-lize the electricity grid. Finally, the IES may also help to reduce the carbon-footprint of new en-ergy-intensive DC applications by directly consuming electricity from RES-plants.