Source Side Mitigation of AI Datacenter Power Fluctuations with a Hybrid Energy Storage System and Residual Differentiable Predictive Control
For grid operators and datacenter operators, this work provides a local solution to mitigate frequency disturbances caused by AI workloads, reducing the need for grid-level interventions.
This paper proposes a hybrid energy storage system with differentiable predictive control (HESS-DPC) to smooth power fluctuations from AI datacenters. Simulations on the NPCC 140-bus system show it reduces generator peak-to-peak frequency deviations by over 80%, with the worst-affected generator dropping from 15.1 mHz to 1.3 mHz.
The rapid growth of hyperscale AI datacenters introduces structured, workload-driven active-power fluctuations at the point of interconnection. These fluctuations appear to the grid as time-varying disturbance injections that cannot be captured by conventional peak- or average-load representations. To reduce the residual power disturbance before it propagates into the bulk power system, this paper proposes a hybrid energy storage system with differentiable predictive control (HESS-DPC) framework for datacenter-side power smoothing. A workload-driven disturbance model is first established, representing the point-of-interconnection load deviation as the superposition of training and fine-tuning workloads to capture the structured forcing inputs that can excite generator frequency dynamics. A frequency-based rule-based controller then allocates this deviation between a battery energy storage system (BESS) and a supercapacitor (SC), assigning the energy-dominant component to the BESS and the fast-varying component to the SC. To overcome the anticipation and constraint limitations of fixed-frequency decomposition, a residual differentiable predictive control policy is trained offline to compute finite-horizon command corrections around the rule-based baseline while enforcing a one-step safeguard. Simulations on the NPCC 140-bus system show that HESS-DPC reduces grid-side residual deviations during workload transitions, improves SC state-of-charge sustainability over extended operation, and reduces generator peak-to-peak frequency deviations by more than 80 percent across all monitored generators, with the worst-affected generator response falling from 15.1 mHz to 1.3 mHz. These results confirm that local active-power smoothing at the datacenter point of interconnection can substantially mitigate frequency disturbances caused by AI workloads.