Grid Operational Benefit Analysis of Data Center Spatial Flexibility: Congestion Relief, Renewable Energy Curtailment Reduction, and Cost Saving
This addresses grid reliability and renewable integration issues for power system operators, offering a novel but incremental solution by leveraging existing data center capabilities.
The paper tackles the challenge of grid congestion and renewable energy curtailment caused by growing data center loads by assessing spatial flexibility to migrate workloads, showing it reduces line overloads by up to 30.1% and solar curtailment by up to 61.0% in case studies.
Data centers are facilities housing computing infrastructure for processing and storing digital information. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence is driving unprecedented growth in data center capacity, with global electricity demand from data centers projected to double by 2026. This growth creates substantial challenges for power transmission networks, as large concentrated loads can cause congestion and threaten grid reliability. Meanwhile, the intermittent nature of solar and wind generation requires flexible resources to maintain grid reliability and minimize curtailment. This paper assesses whether data center spatial flexibility-the ability to migrate computational workloads geographically-can serve as a grid resource to address these challenges. An optimal power flow model is developed to co-optimize generation dispatch, security reserves, and flexible data center loads. Case studies on a modified IEEE 73-bus system show that inflexible data center placement can lead to severe transmission violations, with line overloads reaching 30.1%. Enabling spatial flexibility mitigates these violations in the studied scenarios and restores system feasibility. This flexibility also reduces solar curtailment by up to 61.0% by strategically reallocating load to solar-rich areas. The results suggest that spatial flexibility offers a viable approach to defer transmission upgrades and enhance renewable utilization.