Introducing flexibility into data centers for smart cities

In Europe, more and more cities are aiming to become part of the “smart cities” vision. Smart Cities are based on a plethora of sensor data which need to be processed in data centres. Therefore data centres play an important role in making cities smart. However, at the same time they are huge consumers of electrical energy and thus counteract smart cities’ goals of an IT based low carbon economy. The project DC4Cities takes up the challenge of turning data centres into flexible energy consumers that to a high degree run on renewable energy sources. It offers a technical solution for optimizing the share of renewables in data centre energy consumption and supports this by novel contracts and business models. This paper introduces power management options between data centres and a smart city which are backed by adaptation strategies within the data centre. It also presents a set of contracts that complement the technical solution and a trial evaluation of the approach.