Dual Power: Integrating Renewable Energy into Green Datacenters without Grid Tie Inverter

Abstract

There has been growing concern about energy consumption and environmental impact of data centers. Some pioneers begin to power data centers with renewable energy to offset carbon footprint. However, it is challenging to integrate intermittent renewable energy into data center power system. Grid-tied system is widely deployed in renewable energy powered data centers. But the drawbacks (e.g. Harmonic disturbance and costliness) of grid tie inverter harass this design. Besides, the mixture of green load and brown load makes power management heavily depend on software measurement and monitoring, which often suffers inaccuracy. We propose Dual Power, a novel power provisioning architecture that enables green data centers to integrate renewable power supply without grid tie inverters. To optimize Dual Power operation, we propose two optimization schemes (LM and PS) under different data center operation scenarios. The experimental results show that Dual Power can be as efficient as grid-tied system. In contrast to previous works, Daul Power integrates renewable power at lower cost and maintains full availability of data center servers.