Converting DCs in Energy Flexibility Ecosystems (CATALYST)

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CATALYST (Converting DCs in Energy Flexibility Ecosystems (CATALYST))

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2019-04-01 al 2020-09-30

Human activities are becoming more and more digitised. Huge amount of data is stored, managed, processed in a continuously increasing number of Data Centres that, today, are among the largest energy consumers and in the next future could need a quantity of energy per year equal to one fifth of the global energy consumption. Integrating renewable sources, improving energy efficiency, reuse waste heat as well as opening these facilities to the surrounding areas by enabling the exchange of energy between data centres and neighbourhood areas are some of potential solutions to reduce energy consumption, to improve DC reliability and to ensure the resilience of energy supply to climate changes. However, very few solutions, despite validated in lab, have been successfully deployed on operational DCs, mostly due to technological fragmentation, excessive CAPEX and lack of appropriate business models. CATALYST addresses these challenges through turning existing/new DCs into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in RES 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 DOLPHIN projects, CATALYST adapts, scales up, validates, and deploys an innovative, adaptable technological and business framework aimed at:
i) exploiting available DC non-IT legacy assets (onsite RES/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;
ii) deploying Cross-DC cross-infrastructures (e.g. heat vs IT) IT workload orchestration, by combining heat-demand driven HPC geographical workload balancing, with traceable ICT-load migration between federated DCs to match IT demands with time-varying on-site RES (“follow the energy approach”);
iii) providing marketplace-as-a-service tools to nurture novel ESCO2.0 business models. The adaptation and replication potential of CATALYST is demonstrated through carrying out four different real-life trials spanning through the full spectrum of DCs types (fully distributed DCs, HPC, co-location, legacy) and architectures (from large centralized versus decentralized micro-DCs).
After 36 months of research and development, CATALYST has achieved all the planned objectives and proved that DCs can really play an active role at the crossroad of different energy network. CATALYST is able to process the DC monitoring data (energy consumption, temperatures, state of charge of batteries, power adsorption etc.) and to exploit the intrinsic redundancy of DC's infrastructure as a source of flexibility that can be sold to other key stakeholders (DSO, TSO, consumers, other DCs etc.). Thermal energy, electric flexibility, IT workload, natively coupled into a DC, can be traded on a properly developed multi-asset marketplace, another important outcome of the project. This marketplace is an important evolution of what developed in the GEYSER project because it includes an IT load marketplace, it allows to couple market actions in different marketplaces and it is released as a service (MaaS - Market as a Service), i.e. it was cloudified.
The results of the project appear to be innovative and perfectly aligned with the most recent technological trends. This paves the way toward a real exploitation of the project outcomes.

After the identification of the functional and not functional requirements of the CATALYST technological framework, the Consortium has developed and tested all the software components and tools of the architecture and complete the validation on 4 pilot sites. The IT workload migration has been finalized, tested, and deployed on SBP, QRN and PSNC pilots. The IT load balancer has become part of the clearing mechanism of the IT workload marketplace. Thermal and electrical flexibility modelling, prediction and management tools have been finalized, released, and deployed in time. The marketplace has been re-designed and developed to couple the different instances where participants can trade different assets (power, heat, IT workload). The cloudification of the marketplace has been completed, released, and deployed as MaaS (Market as a Service). The integration of the different components has produced the integrated CATALYST framework and several test cases has been executed to collect the first results and then refined and executed again to gather and analyse the results of the validation on pilots. The exploitation plan and the potential business models have been better detailed and discussed during the Second Review meeting in Brussels (October 2019). The complete CATALYST solution consists in:
• CATALYST FlexManager & Federator;
• CATALYST FleXchange - Electricity Marketplace;
• CATALYST FleXchange - Heat Marketplace;
• CATALYST FleXchange - Flexibility Marketplace;
• CATALYST FleXchange - IT Load Marketplace;
• CATALYST FleXchange - Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS).
Among the described outcomes, notable is the Green DC Roadmap which could be defined as a pathway that the DCs owners and operators can cover for achieving sustainable objectives for their facilities.
A final exploitation plan including the financial analysis have been released.
Many changes have applied to the CATALYST official website according to the comments received by the Consortium for both the PO and the reviewers. The results of the project achieved have been widely disseminated toward proper target audiences beside the strong constraints imposed by the COVID emergency. New dissemination material has been properly released (webinars, cartoon, pilot videos).

CATALYST aims at applying many technological innovations to existing and new DCs that mainly concern:
1) DC waste heat reuse/regeneration and DHC integration (by delivering an innovative energy flexibility framework considering waste heat regeneration/reuse)
2) Multi-carrier marketplaces (by proposing and validating innovative multi-carrier marketplaces which enable next generation DCs to offer mutualised yet synergetic optimization services to the Smart Energy system)
3) Electrical and thermal energy flexibility optimization (by proposing the development of an optimization engine that will address the DC energy flexibility in a holistic and integrated manner while considering both the electrical and thermal energy types).
4) Reverse Demand Response (DR) model: Holistic, closed-loop energy prediction ( by releasing the first holistic, real-life, close to market framework to reverse the DR model into a predictive and proactive, RD model).
5) “Follow the energy” flexible placement of IT load (by releasing the innovative “follow the energy” concept, where energy-aware mapping algorithms, for placement, scaling and migration, will be implemented and validated).

Thanks to all the innovative tools that CATALYST has released, a relevant impact is expected on DC domains as well as on society:

A) Bringing data centre specific innovative energy efficiency technologies and solutions, already developed by research projects, to market faster and cheaper.
B) Reaching a Power Usage Effectiveness of up to 1.2.
C) Achieving a high share of the data centre energy consumption covered by sustainable energy resources.

Artwork describing the CATALYST concept

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CATALYST (Converting DCs in Energy Flexibility Ecosystems (CATALYST))

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