Virtualizing Balancing Power: An Energy-Aware Load Dispatcher for Cloud Computing

Balancing mechanisms assure grid stability. Especially well-suited for balancing purposes are large-scale storage facilities (SFs). However, the potential for these is in major parts set by geographic realities. On a transnational level, offering that potential to regions in need of balancing power (BP) does not often appear to be economically viable an issue that is frequently related to the construction of power lines. Thus, in this article, we illustrate an early version of a design artifact giving remote balancing mechanisms access to a local BP market without deploying power lines: utilization of data centers (DCs) is typically very low (30-40%) representing a cheap source of demand flexibility. We thus let one DC participate in an existing BP market while tying a second to a remote balancing mechanism. By doing so, the design artifact enables both load and BP to flow seamlessly between distinct power markets contributing to grid stability and efficient utilization of balancing mechanisms. Within this extended summary, we perform a preliminary evaluation of the design artifact based on real-world data.