DualPower: Integrating renewable energy into green datacenters without grid tie inverter

There has been growing concern about energy consumption and environmental impact of datacenters. Some pioneers begin to power datacenters with renewable energy to offset carbon footprint. However, it is challenging to integrate intermittent renewable energy into datacenter power system. Grid-tied system is widely deployed in renewable energy powered datacenters. But the drawbacks (e.g. Harmonic disturbance and costliness) of grid tie inverter harass this design. Besides, the mixture of green load and brown load makes power management heavily depend on software measurement and monitoring, which often suffers inaccuracy. We propose DualPower, a novel power provisioning architecture that enables green datacenters to integrate renewable power supply without grid tie inverters. To optimize DualPower operation, we propose two optimization schemes (LM and PS) under different datacenter operation scenarios. The experimental results show that DualPower can be as efficient as grid-tied system. In contrast to previous works, DaulPower integrates renewable power at lower cost and maintains full availability of datacenter servers.