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.
