Power management company Eaton is building an energy service for data centres that will enable organisations to participate in grid level frequency regulation by using UPS back-up power. The service is aimed at large data centre operators and will launch across European markets in Q4 2017.

Eaton said research had found growing appetite amongst data centre professionals to consider selling spare energy from their power systems back to the market.

Janne Paananen, technology manager for Power Quality, Eaton EMEA, said, “The data centre industry has been moving away from focusing solely on energy and cost savings over the last five years, and it is now more about making investments pay for themselves. Data centre professionals can create a revenue generation strategy around assets that they already have, such as the UPS. There’s free money lying on the floor, just waiting to be picked up.”

Eaton has worked with utility Fortum to show that UPS, which uses stored power in the event of a power failure, can be used to regulate demand from the grid, as well as for up and down stream charging. Data centre operators can generathe additional revenue to offset the total cost of ownership of the UPS or as part of making the data centr more competitive on price. Eaton says a data centre could expect to raise up to €50,000 per MW of power allocated to grid support per year.