Research on Location and Capacity Planning of Datacenters in Smart Grids with Renewable Sources

Abstract

Considering the huge power consumption and controllable characteristic of datacenters, they can be potential loads integrated into smart grids with renewable sources so as to consume the generated energy which is usually intermittent and unstable, in order to keep the smart grid more stable. In this paper, we attempt to exploit the possible impact of datacenters in smart grids with renewable sources and focus on the location and capacity planning of the datacenter construction. Subject to voltage and branch power constraints, we formulated the problem to find the optimal datacenter location and capacity and proposed an algorithm to solve it based on genetic algorithm. Then, we analyzed the total power loss of the grid system under different conditions and the impact by the change of datacenter locations. Experimental results show that the approach proposed in this paper can find better solutions for location and capacity planning of several datacenters, so as to reduce the total loss of the power grid and maintain the stability of the power grid more effectively.