Not All Doom and Gloom: How Energy-Intensive and Temporally Flexible Data Center Applications May Actually Promote Renewable Energy Sources

Abstract

To achieve a sustainable energy system, a further increase in electricity generation from renewable energy sources (RES) is imperative. However, the development and implementation of RES entail various challenges, e.g., dealing with grid stability issues due to RES’ intermittency. Correspondingly, increasingly volatile and even negative electricity prices question the economic viability of RES-plants. To address these challenges, this paper analyzes how the integration of an RES-plant and a computationally intensive, energy-consuming data center (DC) can promote investments in RES-plants. An optimization model is developed that calculates the net present value (NPV) of an integrated energy system (IES) comprising an RES-plant and a DC, where the DC may directly consume electricity from the RES-plant. To gain applicable knowledge, this paper evaluates the developed model by means of two use-cases with real-world data, namely AWS computing instances for training Machine Learning algorithms and Bitcoin mining as relevant DC applications. The results illustrate that for both cases the NPV of the IES compared to a stand-alone RES-plant increases, which may lead to a promotion of RES-plants. The evaluation also finds that the IES may be able to provide significant energy flexibility that can be used to stabilize the electricity grid. Finally, the IES may also help to reduce the carbon-footprint of new energy-intensive DC applications by directly consuming electricity from RES-plants.

Renewable Energy Transition Facilitated by Bitcoin

“…An analysis of the integrated energy system combining a renewable source power plant and a computational data center has demonstrated that such an approach offers higher net present value than the standalone power plant solution. 51 However, the main difference between a conventional data center and bitcoin is the feasible interruptibility of the latter. Similar conclusions were reached for specific analyses of wind power in Brazil 52 and both wind and solar power in Texas.…”

“…Bitcoin mining and operations of the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google, or Netflix fit the bill. An analysis of the integrated energy system combining a renewable source power plant and a computational data center has demonstrated that such an approach offers higher net present value than the standalone power plant solution . However, the main difference between a conventional data center and bitcoin is the feasible interruptibility of the latter.…”

Enabling end-to-end digital carbon emission tracing with shielded NFTs

“…Research stream on energy informatics and CO 2 emission tracing applications is widespread, ranging, among others, from topics concerning energy efficiency (Watson et al 2010), energy flexibility, e.g., provided by electric vehicles (Holly et al 2020) or its exploitation via artificial intelligence (Fridgen et al 2022;Hanny et al 2022), over data centers that are enabled to act in the sense of the energy transition (Klingert 2018;Fridgen et al 2021), to the potential of IS for future energy data spaces to improve collaboration and energy systems' robustness (Körner et al 2022). In 2014, Goebel et al provided an overview of goals, themes, and use cases of Energy Informatics research that distinguishes relevant topics between "smart energy-saving systems" and "smart grids" (Goebel et al 2014).…”

A System for Sustainable Usage of Computing Resources Leveraging Deep Learning Predictions

“…Fridgen et al [29], like many other researchers of the past few years, concentrate on the massive amount of energy consumed by two intensive and widespread computing processes: machine learning and cryptocurrency mining on systems, such as Bitcoin (the most widely traded and mined cryptocurrency, the precursor to the current age of blockchain-based applications [30]). Based on the findings of Fridgen et al, there is some hope though that the existence of these high-cost systems would drive further investment into renewable energy sources.…”