Data Centres (DC) are among the largest yet increasing energy consumers, due to the rising demand for digital services in human activities. RES integration and energy efficiency improvements have the potential to reduce significantly DC carbon footprint and influence on environment. Appropriate application of these solutions can also support resilience and security of energy ecosystem. However, very few solutions, despite validated in lab, have been successfully deployed on operational DCs, mostly due to technological fragmentation, excessive CAPEX and lack of appropriate business models.
CATALYST addresses these challenges through turning existing/new DCs into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in RES and energy efficiency by offering flexibility services to the smart energy grids (both electricity and heat grids). By leveraging on the outcomes of FP7 GEYSER and DOLPHIN projects, CATALYST adapts, deploys and validates an innovative, adaptable technological and business framework aimed at exploiting available DC non-IT legacy assets to deliver simultaneous energy flexibility services to multi-energy coupled electricity/heat/IT load marketplaces. The adaptation and replication potential of CATALYST is demonstrated through carrying out four different real life trials spanning through the full spectrum of DCs types (fully distributed DCs, HPC, co-location, legacy) and architectures (from large centralized versus decentralized micro-DCs).
The project is implemented by a scientific and industrial consortium: Engineering (project leader), Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center, Singular Logic S.A., ENEL, Aliander, Green IT Amsterdam, Schuberg Philis, QARNOT Computing, Power Operations Limited, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca.
Potential recipients of the product are data centers and aggregators of Demand Side Response services.
