CATALYST Project Update
CATALYST aspires to turn data centres into flexible multi-energy hubs, which can sustain investments in renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. Leveraging on results of past projects, CATALYST has adapted, scaled up, deployed and is in the process of validating an innovative technological and business framework that enables data centres to offer a range of mutualized energy flexibility services to both electricity and heat grids, while simultaneously increasing their own resiliency to energy supply.
As we enter the last 6 months of the project, in this article we focus on some of the project outputs, the first are the results from the Pont Saint Martin, one of our pilot sites, this site is testing the ability for the data centre to go “off grid” during maintenance operations and sell the “energy” to the grid or even on a local energy flexibility marketplace, more information can be found on this link https://project-catalyst.eu/news/running-catalyst-at-the-data-center-in-pont-saint-martin/
Other sites are finalising their pilot projects and will be featured on the CATALYST website, once published, in fact some provisional results have already been uploaded to the new website and will shortly be available once we’ve changed over (in fact we may have already changed over by the time this article is published!)
Another part of the project is the development of the Green Data Centre Roadmap and associated Green Data Centre Handbook, whilst the handbook is still in development (scheduled to be released by September 2020) the latest version of the Roadmap has been released, and more information on the map can be found on this link https://project-catalyst.eu/news/green-data-centre-roadmap/
We’ve also been transforming our website in order to meet some of the comments from the Commission, in fact, not so much a transformation but a completely new site. We’re just in the final stages of snagging and then this site will be live.
The CATALYST marketplace is also well advanced and the software can be downloaded from our Gitlab page on the website, which is https://gitlab.com/project-catalyst/releases
We also referenced elements of the EU Green Deal, although the implementation will probably be held over until we’ve dealt with the Coronavirus Emergency, our view is that the deal, which can be found here https://project-catalyst.eu/news/eu-green-deal-data-centres/ is very good for our project, as it specifically targets data centres, going so far as to say, ““Data centres and telecommunications will need to become more energy efficient, reuse waste energy, and use more renewable energy sources. They can and should become climate neutral by 2030.” More information can be found in the link
We had planned to attend quite a few events in order to disseminate the projects findings and results to the wider community and it was quite an adventure keeping up with all the cancellations and postponements, no sooner had a blog post, tweet and linked in page update been written, when new information was published that meant it had to be rewritten, this lasted for about 2 weeks and was incredibly frustrating and time consuming but we had to ensure that we were providing the absolutely latest info. After a while we gave up and just started to publish events that we knew were still scheduled to go ahead, but after a while that became a very short list, so we wrote a blog entry stating that most of the events scheduled had been cancelled and to refer back to our “news and events” page for the latest updates.
So, in essence, the project continues and is yielding very promising results, which support and underpin the EU views on data centre energy efficiency and carbon neutrality.
We thank Data Centres Ireland for the opportunity to relay information on the project during this lockdown period and we look forward to working with them for the event in Dublin, late November 2020 where we will be hoping to provide a lot more information on the project results to the delegates.
Until then…
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