Distributed Redundant Integration of Data Center Battery Storage with the Grid for Regulation Services

Data centers are one of the fastest growing loads in the electric grid. Since all data centers use energy storage as backup and fail-over to onsite generation, the growth in data center load is accompanied by a growth in storage capacity. This paper studies how these storages can be integrated with the grid to provide frequency services. We consider the distributed redundant architecture in data centers, where the computing loads are served even when single component fails. We provide an optimization framework for maximizing the economic benefit from using the storage subject to these redundancy constraints. We show the problem can be solved efficiently to allocate resources from multiple batteries inside a data center.