Voltage Regulation in Distribution Systems with Data Center Loads

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed voltage regulation method leveraging data center load control capabilities, using local voltage measurements and dynamic scaling to maintain safe voltage levels amid increasing data center power demands.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dynamic voltage control scheme that utilizes data center load regulation and local measurements for improved voltage stability in power grids.

Findings

Effective voltage regulation demonstrated through simulations with real LLM inference loads.

Open source data and control scheme facilitate further research and validation.

Maintains safe voltage levels despite volatile data center power demands.

Abstract

Recent boom in foundation models and AI computing have raised growing concerns on the power and energy trajectories of large-scale data centers. This paper focuses on the voltage issues caused by volatile and intensity of data center power demand, which also aligns with recent observations of more frequent voltage disturbances in power grids. To address these data center integration challenges, we propose a dynamic voltage control scheme by harnessing data center's load regulation capabilities. By taking local voltage measurements and adjusting power injections at each data center buses through the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) scheme, we are able to maintain safe voltage magnitude in a distributed fashion with higher data center computing load. Simulations using real large language model (LLM) inference load validate the effectiveness of our proposed mechanism. Both the LLM power data and proposed control scheme are open sourced.