A PERSPECTIVE OF ENERGY AND POWER QUALITY OF DATA CENTER ON THE GRID

Data centers are believed to be a significant part of the load in many areas in the future. The future trend of energy usage in data centers depends on many factors including the efficiency of the equipment used and IT usage. Loads such as residential loads, office loads, agriculture loads, etc. show a daily, weekly and seasonal variation in the power consumption. The behavior of data centers w.r.t power consumption may differ. The paper, therefore, characterizes data centers from the grid perspective in terms of their power consumption and power quality. An example grid consisting of data center and renewable energy sources is used as a reference and the impact on power quality, in terms of harmonics and their propagation for the system is presented. The paper also shows how different power generating sources (E.g. wind, solar, hydro, etc.) perceive the data center as a load.