Frequency Stability Challenges and Solutions in Low-Inertia Power Systems with Hyperscale Data Centres

The rapid growth of large-scale data centres is introducing new, fast-acting electrical demand characteristics that may bring challenges to power system operation and stability, in particular power system frequency control and stability. This paper examines how utility-scale data centre operation, driven by AI training and inferencing workloads, may result in sudden active power mismatch to power systems and thus may pose risk to frequency stability and control, mainly due to different modes of data centre operation or server load variability. A modelling framework is proposed to represent key data centre behaviours relevant to frequency control studies, including voltage-driven uninterruptable power supply (UPS) switching strategy and high-magnitude server load fluctuations. The data…