Ehsan Nasr, Lingling Fan
September 2023 commemorates a significant milestone as IEEE Electrification Magazine celebrates its 10th anniversary. We have invited the founding editor-in-chief, Prof. Saifur Rahman of Virginia Tech (2023 IEEE president and CEO), and the past editor-in-chief, Prof. Iqbal Husain of North Carolina State University, to voice their perspectives on the electrification technologies and their expectations to the magazine. Their articles can be found in the special section of the 10th anniversary celebration.
It is worthwhile to emphasize the unique characteristic of IEEE Electrification Magazine. This magazine is supported by three IEEE societies: the IEEE Power & Energy Society, IEEE Industry Applications Society, and IEEE Power Electronics Society. The magazine covers a wide range of topics critical to electrification technologies of the electric energy sector and the transportation sector. Many of our magazine articles were penned by renowned researchers and are expected to generate long-lasting impacts. Figure 1 shows the top five most popular articles in June 2023. These articles collectively provide diverse coverage of topics related to electrification, ranging from electric vehicles and aircraft electrification to renewable energy integration challenges.
Figure 1. The five most popular articles in June 2023.
The theme of the current issue is powering data centers. In their new book, Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity, two economists, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examined technology advances and their impacts on societies. According to Acemoglu and Johnson, we are now at the crossroads of the third technological shift into the digital era. The first shift occurred with agricultural advancements in Western Europe and China, while the second was brought about by the Industrial Revolution in Britain and the United States. Today, digital technologies reign.
In this digital technology-dominated economy, data and networks have become essential parts of business and daily life. There was a saying from Mark Cuban (an American entrepreneur and investor): “Some industries are going to be more affected by the Internet than others, but every industry will be affected.” Former U.S. Senator Kent Conrad stated that “access to computers and the Internet has become a basic need for education in our society.” Indeed, the Internet makes accessing data and sharing data convenient. In a recent gathering in Taiwan, NVIDIA’s president, Jensen Huang, introduced several powerful computing servers for data centers and claimed that the majority of computing in future will be done in data centers. On the other hand, data centers consume enormous electricity. How will they be powered while carbon emission reduction is still being considered? This issue of IEEE Electrification Magazine specifically addresses power and energy technologies for data centers.
Cloud computing is one of the fastest growing technologies in modern society. Also, the rapid growth of artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a paradigm shift in the digitalization era. For example, ChatGPT, a popular chatbot, has become one of the fastest growing consumer applications powered by the AI model. Cloud computing services are provided by data centers. Powering data centers and digital infrastructure requires a significant portion of electricity production. According to a 2018 article in Nature, “How to Stop Data Centers From Gobbling Up the World’s Electricity” by Nicola Jones, 21% of total electricity will be used to power data centers in 2030. While this number may not be applicable globally, it could be applied in some regions or countries with significant data center deployment, such as Ireland. In a recent Power Summit meeting hosted by the Electric Power Supply Association on 21 March 2023, Manu Asthana, president and CEO of PJM Interconnection, told the audience that the significant load increase due to large datacenters (some at the gigawatt scale) has become one prominent concern in keeping lights on.
With reliability and resilience being the cornerstones of data center operation, data centers require not only strong connections to the power grid but also backup power, usually provided by diesel generators. Thus, carbon emissions have become a big concern for data centers. Many companies, hyperscalers (e.g., Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta), utilities, and technology institutes have already set their commitments for decarbonization to meet their sustainability targets, and data centers could play a significant role through the energy transition. This special section, including two columns and four feature articles, aims to provide insights on various aspects of opportunities in power and energy technologies for data centers, including microgrids to integrate clean energy resources, controls and communications in data centers, dynamic grid support services, etc.
Contributors to this themed topic are all from the industry with first-hand experience in powering data centers. Dean Nelson, the founder of Infrastructure Masons, penned the “Technology Leaders” column, “Digital Infrastructure Bites Off Carbon: How the builders of the Digital Age Came Together to Combat Climate Change.” Nelson shows that there are three types of data centers: providers (e.g., hyperscalers, such as Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta, delivering electronic services and consuming gigawatt-level power), networks (e.g., Internet exchange service provides), and crypto (e.g., crypto mining and blockchain service providers); in 2021, the electricity consumption of data centers was more than the entire electricity consumption in the United Kingdom. The digital infrastructure industry has been contemplating how to reduce the climate impact from data centers, and efforts have been taken by the industry to accurately count carbon emission and achieve net zero, mainly through power purchase agreements for renewables.
The viewpoint column, “Transmission Planning and Large Data Centers,” was contributed by Parag Mitra of the Electric Power Research Institute. In this column, Mitra presents many operational challenges caused by data centers where power electronic converters have been employed extensively. Mitra argues that data centers are a new type of load and that proper modeling is required for reliability. On the other hand, this modeling work is a new challenge that requires open communication and collaboration among grid planners, data center owners, and converter original equipment manufacturers.
The first feature article, “Evolving a Data Center Into a Microgrid: Industry Perspectives and Lessons Learned,” was contributed by Stuart Sheehan and Alexander Rakow from Schneider Electric. The authors specifically address the need of decarbonization or data centers and the technology for decarbonization, including setting up microgrids with renewables and achieving an uninterruptable power supply through microgrid control.
Janne Paananen of Eaton contributed the second feature article, “Grid–Interactive Data Centers Enabling Energy Transition.” Paananen shares the same perspective of Mitra that data centers are a new type of load. He presents the challenges of nonsynchronous renewable energy resources and system inertia and discusses how data centers can help to address these challenges. The author further shows that an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) is a critical component to integrate energy storage systems and provide bidirectional power flow. Leveraging the UPS’s flexible control capability through fast-acting power electronic converters, data centers can be used to provide grid-supporting services to help maintain reliability.
The third feature article, “Virtual Power Plant Empowerment in the Next Generation of Data Centers,” contributed by Farid Katiraei and coauthors, is the result of a collaboration between Quanta Technology and Meta. Instead of dealing with one data center at a time, a virtual power plant (VPP) platform can deal with multiple data centers in a region. The primary goal of this article is to address the technoeconomic challenges of VPPs when clean and reliable distributed energy resources at data centers are to be integrated. The authors explain power topologies and control architectures for data center VPPs along with some business cases.
In the fourth feature article, “Transforming Data Center Power Infrastructure: Embracing the Dynamic Grid and Hydrogen Fuel Cells,” Arturo Di Filippi of Vertiv, Italy, argues that hydrogen fuel cells have more advantages over intermittent renewables and can replace diesel to serve as backup power. Additionally, fuel cells, along with batteries, are capable of providing fast dynamic grid support as long as a control system based on the UPS is properly configured.
Besides the themed topic, this issue includes three feature articles and a history column. The fifth feature article, “Silicon Carbide Inverter for Off-Road Heavy-Duty Applications” was contributed by Brij Singh of John Deere and coauthors. The authors present the thermal and thermomechanical design and analysis executed by John Deere and the National Renewable Energy Lab.
Guillermo Catuogno and coauthors from the National University of San Luis, Argentina, contributed the sixth feature article: “LabTA Model, a Guide to Empower Rural Communities.” The article presents a working methodology to mitigate energy poverty in Latin America, with the creation of microgrids using renewable energy sources as the key technology and knowledge sharing or open technology as another indispensable tool.
James Guest and coauthors from the Australia Electric Market Operator (AEMO) and Manitoba Hydro International (MHI) contributed the seventh feature article, “Speeding Up Electromagnetic Transient Simulations for Inverter-Based Resources.” Inverter-based resources (IBRs), e.g., solar photovoltaics, have become a major generation source in the AEMO footprint. Reliable operation of IBRs requires a thorough check of various operating scenarios, for which computer simulation provides a cheap tool. This article presents the challenges facing AEMO in conducting computing-intensive electromagnetic transient (EMT) simulation and how engineers from AMEO and MHI speed up EMT simulation and achieve a large-scale IBR simulation.
The history column wraps up the two-part contributions from Prof. Marcelo Godoy Simões on the concise history of induction motor drives. Part 1 (published in June 2023 issue) covers the technology advancements in hardware switching devices, embedded systems, and control algorithms that made the digital control of induction motors efficient. In particular, power electronics switching circuits advanced from low-frequency silicon-controlled rectifiers to kilohertz insulated-gate bipolar transistors, Texas Instruments made digital signal processing chips feasible, and the invention of pulsewidth modulation separated switching and power stage control for converters. Part 2 presents the details of the advancements of control algorithms from scalar control to vector control. This is another big step in induction motor drives. Vector control is for position control. Compared to scalar control for speed regulation, position control is much more accurate and faster. In this concise history, Simões emphasizes the importance of integration and synergy. Technological advancements in induction motor drives are not possible without progress in various areas, including materials and switching devices; microprocessors and chips; signal processing; control theories; and, naturally, the domain knowledge of electric machines.
We hope you enjoy this issue. We would like to acknowledge the contributing authors; the magazine’s senior publications administrator, Randi E. Scholnick-Philippidis; and the production manager, Christie Inman, for their efforts in producing this issue.
D. Nelson, “Digital infrastructure bites off carbon: How the builders of the digital age came together to combat climate change,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 11–14, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291191.
P. Mitra, “Transmission planning and large data centers,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, p. 92, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291509.
S. Sheehan and A. Rakow, “Evolving a data center into a microgrid,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 16–25, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291193.
J. Paananen, “Grid-interactive data centers enabling energy transition,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 26–34, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291195.
F. Katiraei, S. Morovati, S. Chuangpishit, and S. A. Ghorashi, “Virtual power plant empowerment in the next generation of data centers,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 35–44, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291228.
A. D. Filippi, “Transforming data center power infrastructure,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 45–53, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291254.
B. Singh, E. Cousineau, P. Paret, K. Bennion, and S. Narumanchi, “Silicon carbide inverter for off-road heavy-duty applications,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 54–62, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291255.
G. Catuogno, G. Frias, C. Catuogno, S. Cruz, and S. Galetto, “LabTA model, a guide to empower rural communities,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 63–71, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291257.
J. Guest, I. Commerford, N. Modi, S. Saadati, J. C. Alonso, and T. Kahingala, “Speeding up electromagnetic transient simulations for inverter-based resources,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 72–80, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291270.
M. G. Simões, “A concise history of induction motor drives—Part 2,” IEEE Electrific. Mag., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 82–88, Sep. 2023, doi: 10.1109/MELE.2023.3291288.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MELE.2023.3290830
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