Superconducting microgrid to support transmission between solar PV farms and data centers

Thanks to the SuperRail project, which involved the development in 2023 and the qualification in 2024 of the first commercial superconducting DC cable in the railway network in Paris, a new disruptive application has been identified: the transportation of large DC currents at low voltages without voltage drop over distances of several kilometres between generation and load which are natively in DC. The most cost-effective candidate for large DC generation is photovoltaic solar (PV) where a typical farm can reach an output power of several hundred megawatts (MW) and the typical voltage is 1500V DC. The ideal candidate for a DC load at the same level of power as a PV farm is a data center as they continue to grow from hundreds of MWs towards gigawatt (GW) scale facilities to serve AI development. The use of a PV farm to directly supply a data center eliminates all grid-related deployment limitations such as local power generation capacity, grid transport capacity and supply chain issues, such as the availability of transformers. Simultaneously, this approach dramatically reduces the carbon footprint of AI and data centers in general. This paper presents the specification of a superconducting microgrid that directly connects a PV farm to a data center and the technological components that are utilized to build the system.