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The “unpredictable” nature of renewable energy sources and mobile consumers like electric vehicles leads to power peaks in the distribution network which are correlated in time and space: given the dependency on the local weather conditions and home-work traffic of commuters. One approach to cope with these fluctuations is the massive deployment of energy storage systems. In addition time shifting of energy consumption is being researched. The flexibility obtained by exploiting geographical alternative locations for energy consumers providing similar service levels, is as of yet unaddressed. However, the geographical distribution of both energy consumers and producers could be an important parameter for optimizing the energy network.

The electric vehicles and the processing tasks running on the data center can be considered as mobile consumers which may have alternative geographical locations to “present” their energy consumption load.

The research questions that will be addressed are:

• Can processing tasks be moved to a data center location running on renewable energy?
• Can electric vehicles maximally absorb renewable energy by exploiting their mobile nature?
• Can large functional buildings contribute to a grid-wide storage and demand re-location scheme?
• What are the technological challenges and potential benefits of exploiting geographical load shifting in addition to time shifting?