PowerOps in the H2020 CATALYST project

Project full name: Converting DCs in Energy Flexibility Ecosystems
Project ID: 768739
Project URL: https://project-catalyst.eu

Data Centres are among the largest, yet increasing energy consumers worldwide, due to the rising digitization of human activities. Renewable energy sources integration and energy efficiency improvements have the potential to reduce significantly the data centres carbon footprint, while increasing at the same time the auto-consumed energy, thus improving data centre security and resiliency of supply against climate change. However, very few solutions, despite validated in lab, have been successfully deployed on operational data centres, mostly due to technological fragmentation, excessive CAPEX and lack of appropriate business models. CATALYST will address these challenges through turning existing/new data centres into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in renewable energy sources and energy efficiency by offering mutualized flexibility services to the smart energy grids (both electricity and heat grids). By leveraging on the outcomes of FP7 GEYSER and FP7 DOLFIN projects, CATALYST will adapt, scale up, validate and deploy an innovative, adaptable technological and business framework aimed at:

  1. exploiting available data centre non-IT legacy assets (onsite renewable energy sources/backup generation, UPS/batteries, cooling system thermal inertia, heat pump for waste heat reuse) to deliver simultaneous energy flexibility services to multi-energy coupled electricity/heat/IT load marketplaces
  2. deploying cross-data centre cross-infrastructures (e.g. heat vs IT) IT workload orchestration, by combining heat-demand driven high performance computing geographical workload balancing, with traceable ICT-load migration between federated data centres to match IT demands with time-varying on-site renewable energy sources (“follow the energy approach”)
  3. providing marketplace-as-a-service tools to nurture novel ESCO2.0 business models.

The adaptation and replication potential of CATALYST will be demonstrated through carrying out four different real life trials spanning through the full spectrum of data centre types (fully distributed data centres, high performance computing, co-location, legacy) and architectures (from large centralized versus decentralized micro data centres).

CATALYST offers to PowerOps the chance to evolve the results of the DOLFIN project that are being incorporated into our Data Centres Power Optimization Platform DC-POP. The enablement of monitored, federated resources (a.k.a. cross data centres load migration) will be ameliorated and tested in truly distributed environments, whereas our scheduling mechanisms are also expected to be significantly improved. Dynamic Smart Contracts for tracking federation performance and load allocation are next in the line!