E-ON, Hungary
Pioneers in Europe: first to optimize power production with a data center at a utility company
Our pilot project has been executed in cooperation with the largest, multi-billion dollar electricity utility company of the EU, E.ON, whose Hungarian district heating plant subsidiary has run a Bitcoin mining program, pioneering in its own industry.
The inventiveness of our first optimization project lies in the fact that we have integrated the data center into the daily operation of the power plant as a flexible load. Management of the consumption of our data center belongs to the responsibilities of the plant management control center. This allows the power plant to participate in the frequency control market (demand response tenders) with its full capacity, while also supplying electricity to the data center.
Results
Gas engines produced fewer faults during continuous operation, and the reduction of on-off cycles had a positive effect from a technical point of view. Moreover, the collaboration also increased the flexibility of the control center, improving the gradient of the entire VPP (virtual power plant) portfolio with the possibility of extremely fast intervention. By switching off the consumption of the data center, the capacity of the power plant to be fed into the public network increased (almost) instantaneously (given the presence of a flexible load of -0.4 MW, which in practice means a reaction time of about 1 second).
To learn more about the project, read Bitcoin Magazine’s report on it.