Techno-Economical Assessment of AC and DC Power Distribution Architectures for Data Centers

The data center industry has been experiencing unprecedented growth in recent years due to the increasing demand for cloud-based computing services. Modern data centers require efficient power distribution architectures to improve their reliability while reducing their costs. The recent development of efficient and ultra-fast medium voltage DC breakers enables new DC and hybrid AC/DC architectures. This paper proposes a techno-economic framework for assessing AC/DC power distribution architectures in data centers, which uses a comprehensive set of economic value streams. Different architectures are evaluated and compared, namely low-voltage AC (LVAC), low-voltage DC (LVDC), medium-voltage AC (MVAC), and medium-voltage DC (MVDC) systems. Numerical results show that the LVDC and MVDC architectures can significantly reduce the capital cost of data centers while maintaining a high level of system efficiency. However, the MVDC architecture outperforms the other cases as wide bandgap (WBG) devices prevail as options for power converters.