18:20 · Data centre with its own solar field · evening
The sun is setting on the solar field.
In Hall B a training run is climbing to full power.
The training run at sunset
A data centre answers to two clocks.
The jobs keep their own schedule and do not care about the weather. The sun, the wind and the grid keep theirs. Cooling sits between them, and it is the first thing to run out.
Building management, energy management and the job scheduler each see a third of the picture, in three different rooms.
One evening, minute by minute.
18:40
The ramp outruns the chillers.
IT load in Hall B rises by more than a third in twenty minutes. Rack inlet temperatures follow, slowly. No threshold has been crossed.
18:46
Cooling headroom does the arithmetic.
At this ramp the inlets reach their 27 °C limit in about twenty-five minutes. The agent pulls in the chiller states and the job schedule.
18:48
The energy agent adds the sun.
Solar output reaches zero before 19:10. The battery is at 81 %. Starting a third chiller on grid power alone pushes the site over its contracted peak.
18:50
The twin tests the combinations.
Chiller 3 alone: the inlets still cross the limit. Chiller 3, the battery and a fifteen-minute hold on two batch jobs: safe, and under the peak.
18:52
The facility operator approves.
Building management starts chiller 3, energy management discharges the battery, the scheduler holds the batch jobs.
19:30
The hall settles.
Inlets steady at 24 °C. The training run never slowed, and the grid import stayed under contract.
Who was on shift.
In a data centre the agents span three systems that rarely talk. Cooling headroom watches chillers against the IT ramp. Energy dispatch plans the battery, the solar field and the grid import. Power-quality watch follows UPS units and generators. Alarm correlation turns fifty alarms from three systems into one incident.
Hall B reaches its inlet limit in about 25 min. Start chiller 3, discharge the battery, hold two batch jobs.
Solar falls at 18:40. Battery discharge from 19:00 to 21:00 keeps grid import under the contracted peak.
Illustrative story
Faceplate brings the runtime that dispatches a national grid to a single site: on-site generation, storage, the grid connection, IT load and cooling in one model, on-premise.