Repurposing Coal Power Plants into Thermal Energy Storage for Supporting Zero-carbon Data Centers

Coal power plants will need to be phased out and face stranded asset risks under the net-zero energy system transition. Repurposing coal power plants could recoup profits and reduce carbon emissions using the existing infrastructure and grid connections. This paper investigates a retrofitting strategy that turns coal power plants into thermal energy storage (TES) and zero-carbon data centers (DCs). The proposed capacity expansion model considers the co-locations of DCs, local renewable generation, and energy storage with the system-level coal retirement and retrofitting. We optimize the DC system configurations under the hourly-matching carbon policy and flexible operations. Results show that under hourly-matching carbon constraints, the retrofitted TES could complement the operations of lithiumion batteries (LIBs) to reduce system costs. This could render DCs with optimal co-located renewable generations and energy storage more cost-effective than unconstrained DCs.