Spinning gold from straw - evaluating the flexibility of data centres on power markets

Data centres have been the focus of research as candidates for demand response or other demand side management programs for quite some time. However, a complete framework optimising data centre demand response is still missing. This is due to the complexity of integrating more than one power flexibility technology and more than one market for power flexibility. In the presented work, this challenge is solved by creating a microeconomics inspired optimisation approach that takes the view of a data centre offering power flexibility as a ’product’ to explicit and/or implicit demand response power flexibility markets. This generic framework is then instantiated in a linear optimisation problem that optimises the power flexibility of a German High Performance Computing Centre on a set of different power flexibility markets in Germany. It is consequently shown that, under the described scenario, frequency scaling should be preferred to temporal workload shifting and that the EPEX day ahead market is the most beneficial power flexibility market.