Digital Twin for Telecommunications & Data Center Power Systems

This paper will present new developments in the application of a digital twin for 48VDC telecommunications power systems and data centers. This work was fueled by Ventia’s long partnership with Telstra, Australia’s largest telco. Output from Ventia's digital twin has been in use by our clients for about 5 years providing monthly network resilience data.Our previous work^[1] showed promising early results but with limitations imposed by the vast amounts of data processing required. We report that over 2 hours of computer processing have reduced to just tens of seconds. This advance has allowed new applications to be developed.The paper will describe the application of the digital twin to an annual battery replacement program. A complex problem facing all Telcos is estimating the cost/resilience tradeoff – how much resilience does your capex dollar buy? The available funding for battery replacements must be balanced against competing capital programs. This development has enabled the digital twin to accept a dollar amount to forecast a desired level of resiliency. We will show that it is possible to declare a capital battery budget to produce a defined forecast change in network resilience. Ventia has used this feature to be able to advise clients of the minimum level of funding for battery replacements needed to maintain network resiliency. The interest in digital twins has increased markedly in recent years but few have reported practical and useful outcomes. Results will be presented to show that the resilience of power system assets as described by the digital twin provides up to three years advance warning over more traditional legacy metrics.