Smart grounding for data centres and power network safety

Data Centres are now among the largest and most complex electrical loads on the power network. Yet grounding safety in these facilities is still assessed the way it was assessed thirty years ago, a periodic resistance test, a compliance certificate, and the assumption that nothing critical has changed in between. In a modern data centre, that assumption is no longer safe to make. High-density power electronics, UPS systems, battery storage, and extensive cable-screen and bonding networks create return-path behaviour that shifts continuously with operating state, load profile, and network topology. A grounding system that passed its last inspection may behave very differently during a fault six months later. And in a converter-rich environment, a degraded or altered return path does not just raise a safety concern, it affects whether protection devices operate correctly, whether sensitive IT equipment survives a fault, and whether the facility can be safely re-energized afterward.

This presentation introduces a topology-aware, IoT-enabled framework that addresses this problem directly. Using sparse synchronized measurements from sensors already present in modern facilities, the framework estimates Earth Potential Rise, step voltage, and touch voltage in real time, fully traceable to IEEE Std. 80 and IEC 60364-5-54, without intrusive testing, without outages, and without waiting for the next scheduled inspection cycle. The framework was evaluated across thousands of fault scenarios on a representative data-centre topology. It detects unsafe grounding conditions with 81.6% recall, keeps false alarms below 5 per 1000 decisions, degrades gracefully when sensors are lost or noisy, and completes each update cycle in under one millisecond. A mechanistic ablation study confirms that the performance gain comes from the topology-aware grounding model itself, not from algorithmic complexity, meaning the approach is physically grounded, auditable, and explainable to a standards body.

The broader message is this: grounding does not have to be invisible between inspection cycles. In a converter-rich data centre, it is an observable, measurable, continuously estimable safety state. This presentation shows the engineering framework that makes that possible, the results that support it, and the validation roadmap toward real-world deployment.

Learning outcomes

In this presentation, you will learn:

an understanding of the requirements and challenges to designing a resilient grounding system for Data Centres

the application of a topology-aware, IoT-enabled framework that addresses this problem directly

the benefits of monitoring grounding systems between inspection intervals.

About the speaker

Dr. Mohamad Nassereddine

Associate Professor in Electrical and Power Engineering at the University of Wollongong in Dubai (UOWD)