Development of green data center by configuring photovoltaic power generation and compressed air energy storage systems

In order to develop the green data center driven by solar energy, a solar photovoltaic (PV) system with the combination of compressed air energy storage (CAES) is proposed to provide electricity for the data center. During the day, the excess energy produced by PV is stored by CAES. During the night, CAES supplies power to the data center, so as to reduce the cost of peak electricity consumption at night. To evaluate the system performances, thermodynamic and economic models are established. Thereafter, system performances under design conditions and the effects of system parameters are analyzed. The results indicate that under design conditions, for the 17.5 MW data center, the required solar PV area is 257075 m2, and the highest PV power can reach up to 55 MW. The all-day efficiency of the PV system is 18.37 %. In this situation, a CAES system with 17.5 MW × 7.88 h is configured, and the variations of CAES parameters with time are obtained in a day. The round-trip efficiency is 64.88 % and the energy storage density is 5.02 kW·h·m−3. The total exergy destruction of the whole system within 24 h can be up to 1581001 kW h. For the economic performance, the total cost is $93.87 M and the payback period is 11.84 years.