A Smarter Datacenter for the Smart Grid 

As more businesses and consumers turn to the cloud for systems, apps and storage, datacenters are quickly becoming one of the largest consumers of electric power: the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that these facilities now account for 1.5 percent of electricity consumption. And that figure is only expected to rise.

As datacenters grow to accommodate expanding infrastructure, the electrical systems that once supported them are becoming obsolete, and operators are looking to a new solution to the power problem.

According to Troy Miller, business development and marketing manager for Power Quality Products at S&C Electric Company, the first area that growing datacenters are leading us to rethink is the 480-volt power system that distributes energy throughout the facility.

“Once datacenters use 20-30 MW or more, it’s extremely difficult to support the datacenter with low-voltage power distribution systems,” Miller explains in an article in Smart Grid News. “At 480 volts, a 30-MW datacenter’s electrical system needs to carry nearly 40,000 amps. That’s a tremendous amount of copper conductors to distribute electricity within a datacenter.”

This particularly holds true now that some datacenters exceed even 100 MW of load.

The answer, Miller says, comes in the form of medium-voltage systems, which require less material, take less time to install, and create a smaller footprint, which “ultimately opens more space for servers needed to support core datacenter functions, particularly revenue-generating functions.

What is more, medium-voltage infrastructure opens the door for the latest smart grid solutions, including “self-healing” technology.

“Just as on a utility system, a self-healing system can reroute electricity in the event there is a problem with any of the electrical equipment within the datacenter,” Miller says. “By rerouting power, the datacenter can continue to serve loads with utility-supplied power, and can thus minimize its use of costly and inefficient diesel generators as a backup power source.”

And unlike uninterrupted power supplies, medium-voltage energy storage systems are able to predict the entire facility from power outages, cutting costs created by other backup systems. Furthermore, the energy storage can be used for central power, or as support for frequency regulation of peak shaving, allowing the energy system to drive not only costs, but revenue, Miller says.