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Data centers have a significant potential to become a major source of flexibility in smart girds. They consume currently roughly 3% of all the electricity produced globally and are expected to only increase their consumption as the world becomes more connected and digitalized.

As data centers are required to operate without any interruptions, they use power protection systems and energy storages. This paper investigates the technical and economic feasibility of dual-purposing these power protection systems, the uninterruptible power supplies, and their batteries in data centers to perform primary frequency regulation services. While the topic of data centers and demand response has been extensively covered in the current scientific literature, the focus has been on the demand response enabled by server workload shifting or hardware-enabled peak shaving. Based on an extensive literature review, there is a …