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September 17, 2012

Smart Data Centers on the Smart Grid

Clemens Pfeiffer
CTO, Power Assure

Power Channels: Energy Efficiency, Power Quality Protection, Smart Grid Power

The ability of demand response programs to avert a crisis in the electric grid is so promising that one member of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission identified demand response as a “killer application” for the smart grid. The reason is the growth in demand approaching an estimated 6 billion Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by 2030, while generation from traditional power plants is expected to remain relatively constant at about 4 billion GWh, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The data center, as a major consumer of electrical energy, can and should have a role to play in this “killer application.”

In the aggregate, data centers consume an enormous amount of energy. According to a detailed study conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in August 2007, data centers in the U.S. consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours or 1.5 percent of the nation’s total electricity in 2006, adding some 40 million tons of CO2 to the atmosphere. That amount is twice what was consumed just six years earlier, and the EPA forecasted data center power consumption to double again from 2006 to 2012.

The growing gap between electrical demand and supply will cause the grid to become increasingly unstable and, as a result, energy prices will increase and fluctuate with grid conditions. Most utilities already charge commercial and industrial customers higher rates during periods of peak demand, which usually occur in the later afternoon and early evening. For example, the cost per megawatt-hour of electricity in Texas is usually in the $30-$60 range, but on one hot summer day this year it spiked to $3,000. To encourage continued reductions in consumption, utilities are pursuing both energy efficiency initiatives and peak demand curtailment programs like Demand Response (DR).

While IT departments are usually included in an organization’s energy efficiency initiatives, IT has long been immune to DR programs. But that is likely to change as organizations begin asking their data centers, as major users of electricity, to reduce consumption during these increasingly costly periods peak demand. Fortunately, the same tool being used to improve energy efficiency via Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) measurements can also be used to reduce consumption during DR events: the Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) system.

A capable DCIM system—one that has the ability to automate processes in cooperation with load-balancing or virtualization systems—can be used to shed and shift workloads, and this powerful (no pun intended) capability can be used in two ways to adjust energy consumption for savings and energy market incentives.

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