Repurposing Coal Power Plants into Thermal Energy Storage for Supporting Zero-carbon Data Centers
<|reference_start|>Repurposing Coal Power Plants into Thermal Energy Storage for Supporting Zero-carbon Data Centers: Coal power plants will need to be phased out and face stranded asset risks under the net-zero energy system transition. Repurposing coal power plants could recoup profits and reduce carbon emissions using the existing infrastructure and grid connections. This paper investigates a retrofitting strategy that turns coal power plants into thermal energy storage (TES) and zero-carbon data centers (DCs). The proposed capacity expansion model considers the co-locations of DCs, local renewablewith the system-generation, andlevel coal retir energy storage ement and retrofitting. We optimize the DC system configurations under the hourly-matching carbon policy and flexible operations. Results show that under hourly-matching carbon constraints, the retrofitted TES could complement the operations of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) to reduce system costs. This could render DCs with optimal co-located renewable generations and energy storage more cost-effective than unconstrained DCs.<|reference_end|>
@article{ding2024repurposing,
    title={Repurposing Coal Power Plants into Thermal Energy Storage for Supporting
  Zero-carbon Data Centers},
    author={Yifu Ding, Serena Patel, Dharik Mallapragada, Robert James Stoner},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.09675},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2402.09675},
    primaryClass={eess.SY cs.SY}
}