March 12th, 2014 – Wattics has joined an international consortium of ten European organizations recently awarded €2,97M funding through the European Commission’s R&D 7th Framework program to carry out the GEYSER project.
GEYSER (“Green nEtworked data centres as energY proSumers in smaRt city environments”) is investigating how to realize the intelligent integration of energy-efficient networked urban data centers – substantially powered by renewable energy – with energy infrastructures (i.e. smart power grids and district heating) within the Smart City context.
Wattics is responsible for feeding energy insights and providing internal context for real-time data centre optimisation, integrating event monitoring software technology to the GEYSER platform.
The GEYSER vision is to pave the way for a more holistic concept of the energy-efficient data center: one which will be located in Smart City environments, powered as much as possible by renewable energy sources, and flexibly manage its IT workload in the context of dynamic energy availability. This will be done by trading-off energy (i.e. power and/or heat) exchanges with smart city infrastructures against workload exchanges with other Data Centres in its network.
The main project outcome will be a conceptual, software and business framework for efficiently designing and operating renewable energy-powered networked data centres acting as a flexible energy player within a Smart City /Smart Grid context.
Main Innovation
The main innovation of the project will be to deliver novel tools and practices which support the optimized operation of data center networks which are integrated with smart grids and smart cities. It will also incorporate innovative architectural data center design (including AC/DC Microgrids) which supports advanced relocation solutions for IT workload to Data Centres where renewable energy is available.
GEYSER incorporates innovative approaches to flexible energy demand and supply management (including both electricity and heat), load management within networks of data centers and an energy marketplace for smart grid/smart city interaction.
Proof of concepts and results
GEYSER technologies will be validated in three operational data centers in urban surroundings, partially powered by renewable energy, or with contracted renewable energy at the meter.
GEYSER technologies will provide a concrete answer to how synergies between Data Centres and Smart Cities can be realized: Data Centres can exhibit significant flexibility which can enable them to simultaneously reduce their energy costs while contributing to the energy management objectives of the city.
As a result of the GEYSER project, the key role of green Data Cnters in the Smart City – specifically in relation to optimized energy management and renewable energy consumption – will be clarified, contributing to more efficient energy management in urban areas.
The Consortium
GEYSER is a three year project with a total budget of €4,67M. The GEYSER consortium comprises of Engineering Ingegneria Informatica (Italy, project co-ordinator), the largest Italian public company which provides ICT technology solutions and Data Center services, ABB (Ireland), a global leader in smart grids and Data Center intelligent monitoring and control, Singular Logic (Greece), a leading Greek ICT company which focuses on large IT integration projects, Wattics (Ireland), an Irish SME providing innovative cloud-based energy monitoring and control technology, the Dutch GreenIT Amsterdam (Netherlands) association which promotes the Green agenda in Amsterdam through collaborative international projects as well as local networking and information sharing, the renowned research institutions RWTH Aachen (Germany), a leader in international and national research projects in smart grid automation and control, Technical University of Cluj (Romania) a leader in adaptive multi-criteria control and ZHAW (Switzerland) a leader in cloud computing and Future Internet technologies. Data center end users are well represented in the GEYSER consortium by the Dutch SARA Amsterdam data center, the ASM Terni local multi-utility owned by local municipality, as well as the Pont Saint Martin Data Centre owned and operated by Engineering.
