Optimal Bidding Strategy for Energy Hub Incorporating Data Center Flexibility

With the rapid development of internet technology, data center has become a critical facility for data storage and processing while consuming an increasing amount of electricity in recent years. Previous studies mostly focus on the data center energy management of the servers in a data center, nevertheless ignoring an efficient utilization of its waste heat. Therefore, we propose an optimal bidding strategy for an energy hub while taking advantage of the waste heat from a data center. Instead of releasing the waste heat directly into external environment, our major idea is to recover such energy for building’s space heating that reduces the power consumption from air conditioning. In this paper, a detailed model of data center operation is formulated considering its demand response capability and heat recirculating. A day-ahead market bidding model for an energy hub is formulated considering the flexibility of the data center as well as the cooperation of various forms of distributed energy resources (DERs). Case studies based on a real-world data center demonstrate that the proposed bidding strategy can increase the benefits of the energy hub and improve energy efficiency by making use of waste heat.