How much energy do IDCs use?

According to the United States Data Center Energy Usage Report (Ref. ), IDCs in the U.S. consumed an estimated 70 billion kWh in 2014, accounting for about 1.8% of total U.S. electricity consumption. Ref. shows that the energy demand from IDCs in 2019 was around 200 TWh, comprising around 1% of global electricity use.

Should power utilities invest their own IDCs?

With deep integration of cloud computing in industrial systems, there is an emerging trend that power utilities invest their own IDCs (i.e. private IDCs that only provide access to grid stakeholders and other authorized parties) to provide cyber infrastructure support for grid operation.

What is the computing capacity of an IDC?

The computing capacity of an IDC is defined as the maximum number of requests it can handle in one time slot. For an IDC with m server racks, its computing capacity is mμ. Meanwhile, the maximum number of requests it can buffer is mQ.

Can grid-forming energy storage systems improve system strength?

It is commonly acknowledged that grid-forming (GFM) converter-based energy storage systems (ESSs) enjoy the merits of flexibility and effectiveness in enhancing system strength, but how to simultaneously consider the economic efficiency and system-strength support capability in the planning stage remains unexplored.

How do IDCs and grid energy resources relate to cyber-physical entities?

Compared to existing work, the proposed approach treats IDCs and grid energy resources (BESSs, renewable energy sources, etc.) as integrated cyber-physical entities and investigates their coupling impacts. The proposed framework also models and considers different kinds of computation requests and their operational constraints.

How do IDCs work?

In the framework, the IDC investor plans the location and capacity of IDCs and submits the IDC construction plan to the utility; the utility then checks the grid’s security under the suggested plan. Based on the feedback from the utility, the IDC investor revises the IDC plan until it satisfies the grid’s operation requirements.