Issue 8, Feb/Mar 10
FOCUS POWER
IS THE SMART GRID AN INTELLIGENT MOVE? Does the smart grid have a role to play in the future of data centers? By Yevgeniy Sverdlik
T
he system of power delivery in the US is in trouble – it is old and creaking. To prevent more gigantic financial losses similar to the ones
the US economy has already experienced as a result of blackouts, the government is looking to change the way in which the grid is designed and operated.
The US Department of Energy (DoE) is investing in the research and development of the ‘smart grid’. It defines two main stages in this theoretical development process: a smart grid and a smarter grid.
A smart grid is the vision of a more removed future, according to the DoE’s 2008 paper on the subject, The Smart Grid: An Introduction: “The longer-term promise of a grid remarkable in its intelligence and impressive in its scope.”
A smarter grid is one that can be built using technology that is available today, or that will become available in the near future.
Today’s grid, according to the DoE, is characterised by uninformed consumers, dominance of central generation, limited wholesale markets, slow response to power quality issues, poor integration of operational data with asset management, and vulnerability to “malicious acts of terror and natural disasters”.
The DoE’s vision of the smart grid is that of a system whose consumers are involved and active – one that leverages demand response and distributed energy sources. A smart grid has many distributed energy sources, with focus on renewable energy. The future system is one that is resilient to attacks and natural disasters, and where power quality is a priority.
According to the DoE paper, growth in peak demand for electricity in the US has exceeded growth in transmission by 25% annually since 1982. Lack of sufficient investment into transmission and distribution infrastructure in the country has compromised the grid’s efficiency and reliability.
The US economy has already paid dearly for the lacklustre state of the nation’s electrical infrastructure. According to the
DoE, a rolling blackout across Silicon Valley resulted in losses that totalled $75m. A one- hour outage at the Chicago Board of Trade in 2000 caused a delay in trades that were cumulatively worth about $20 trillion.
The 2003 blackout in the northeast (the largest in US history) caused about $6bn in economic losses to the region.
Theoretically, a smart grid is intelligent enough to sense and predict overloads and reroute power to avoid such outages or minimise their impact.
SMART BUILDINGS An essential component of a smart grid is a smart consumer: a smart building. Data centers are some of the most intelligent buildings built. To GE’s Marcel Van Helten, the strong relationship between the smart grid and the data center is a no-brainer.
“It is an interesting combination that absolutely makes sense,” says Van Helten, infrastructure market director for GE Intelligent Platforms.
Van Helten sees three ways in which data centers relate to the smart grid: as consumers, as contributors and as enablers, although the first two, in a way, fold into the third.
“A data center is a load on the smart grid,” says Van Helten. “What a smart grid wants
to do is be more flexible for producers and consumers to better balance the electricity supply chain.”
PEAK DEMAND When a smart grid is at peak demand and needs to shed load, it can send a signal to some of its largest consumers to come off the grid fully or partially to reduce their consumption. A typical data center is already designed to be able to run independently of the utility feed for a prolonged period of time, and there is usually a largely automated process in place to make the transition quickly.
In Van Helten’s opinion, convincing data center operators to work with their electricity providers in such a way would take incentivising them with lower rates. “For the data center, the energy is a huge cost factor. I would imagine that, in the spirit of making more money, they would actually make that decision.”
Participation in a smart grid would also make a good component for a company’s sustainability programme – something more and more organisations are concerned with.
“Data center operators are interested in being sustainable,” Van Helten says. “They know they’re a major energy consumer and they’re looking at ways to reduce that.”
Besides easing demand on the grid, data
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