The Potential of Data Centre Participation in Ancillary Service Markets in Sweden

Sammanfattning: Today’s society already requires a great connectivity network. This need will only increase in the future, and EDGE data centres are concepts meeting this future need, where the computational power is deployed close to the end user. They are defined, in this thesis, as a concept including different nodes, or data centres, located in proximity connected and participating in the market as one entity. The electricity grid in the Nordics is also a complex system. Many types of interactions with the grid exist and depend on the type of stakeholder. One collection of such interactions is ancillary services, which refer to different types of measures that maintain a reliable grid and electricity system. Electricity consumers within the grid network have the potential to interact and participate in these different functions. In this thesis, the participation of data centres, or EDGE data centres in ancillary services market, is studied. This thesis modelled different scenarios of an EDGE data centre with the grid network. Scenario 1 looked into self-consumption; scenario 2 looked into spot trading; scenario 3 looked into the FCR-N market; scenario 4 looked into the FCR-D markets; and scenario 5 looked into the combination of self-consumption and the FCR-D markets. It is observed from the results that scenario 4 generated the most favourable economic benefits. The results in relation to the price areas (zones in Sweden) were varied for the results. The price area SE4 gave better results for scenarios 1, 2, and 5 as compared to others. The best price area for scenarios 3 and 4 was from the SE1 zone. It is observed from the results that the potential benefit of the different ancillary markets exist and are at times favourable. Hence, there lies a future potential for the participation of EDGE networks in the electricity market thereby generating benefits for the data centres as well as stability for the grid.