Type: Master's Assignment
Educational programme: Sustainable Energy Technology (SET)
Contact: Marco Gerards
For the future operation of data centers, energy and especially sustainability will play an important role. On the one hand, data centers are large energy consumers and to support the sustainability goals and requirements in the future, this energy should in the future be provided (to a large extend) by renewable sources. On the other hand, data centers produce energy in the form of heat (waste) and have back-up facilities for reliability in the form of generators or storage units in their portfolio.
Datacenter Almere has the ambition to approach this problem from a broad perspective and integrate their own energy management with the energy systems of the surrounding area, be it a industrial area, a complete village or city or a rural area.
In the envisioned project, the contribution to and interaction with an existing energy system around the datacenter is investigated. In this project, the student will, amongst others:
- Evaluate the flexibly of the energy usage of the datacenter and possible ways of offering this flexibility to improve the overall operation and sustainability of the surrounding energy system, e.g., by increasing the share of renewable energy generation that can be hosted (i.e., to avoid net congestion) or gets consumed within the region;
- Investigate the potential of using the storage or backup system of the datacenter to support the surrounding energy systems, e.g., in cases of emergencies or stability problems.