Evaluating the Dispatchable Capacity of Cross-Regional Data Center Clusters Toward Power System Operation

Data center clusters (DCCs) are becoming a promising dispatchable resource for power system owing to the temporal and spatial flexibility. To characterize the dispatchable potential of DCCs for power system operation accurately, this study focuses on the cross-regional DCCs with communication links and a dispatchable capacity evaluation method with extended spatial-temporal flexibility and operation risk is proposed. Firstly, the system architecture and the temporal-spatial flexibility description of cross-regional DCCs are illustrated, and the overall dispatchable capacity evaluation framework is presented. Secondly, the extended spatial-temporal flexibility models for cross-regional DCCs are established, which account for the spatial-temporal coupling characteristics of workloads scheduling as well as the data transmission constraints. Then, the conditional value at risk (CVaR) index is employed for qualifying the potential risk of uncertain workloads, and the risk-constrained dispatchable capacity evaluation of cross-regional DCCs is established. Finally, the simplified urban computing power networks with 3 DCCs and 10 DCCs in China are adopted for case studies, from numerical analysis we can draw that, the proposed evaluation method could capture the dispatchable capacity of cross-regional DCCs toward power system operation effectively and features favorable scalability.