Title :
Datacenters as Controllable Load Resources in the Electricity Market
Author :
Rui Wang ; Kandasamy, N. ; Nwankpa, Chika ; Kaeli, David R.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Drexel Univ., Philadelphia, PA, USA
Abstract :
Data centers, being major consumers of power, can play an important role in the efficient operation of electrical grids. This paper develops an optimization framework to allow data centers to operate as controllable load resources within the demand dispatch regime, a demand response (DR) program in which incentives are designed to induce lower electricity use not just during times of high prices but also when the reliability of the local grid is jeopardized or when the electricity supply and demand are unbalanced. Assuming the availability of geographically distributed and virtualized data centers situated in multiple regional electrical markets, the basic idea is to migrate the workload in the form of virtual machines (VMs) between these centers to maximize the expected payoff. The proposed framework addresses issues specific to the demand dispatch of data centers such as timeliness of VM migrations and the impact of geographic distance on migration times. It also explicitly incorporates risks that may cause the load curtailment operation to be ultimately unsuccessful and result in monetary losses to data center operators; specifically, variability in network bandwidth that can cause uncertainty in VM migration times as well as the uncertain payoff when participating in DR markets. A set of case studies involving datacenters participating in an economic DR program is used to validate the framework.
Keywords :
computer centres; deflation (monetary); demand side management; incentive schemes; load dispatching; optimisation; power engineering computing; power grids; power markets; pricing; reliability; virtual machines; virtualisation; DR market; VM migration time; controllable load resource; data center operator; demand dispatch regime; demand response program; electrical grid; electricity supply; expected payoff maximization; geographic distance; geographically distributed data center; incentive; load curtailment operation; monetary loss; multiple regional electrical market; network bandwidth; optimization; pricing; reliability; virtual machine; virtualized data center; Electricity; Electricity supply industry; Load management; Optimization; Real-time systems; Reliability; Servers; Datacenters; demand dispatch; demand response market; risk-aware optimization;
Conference_Titel :
Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS), 2013 IEEE 33rd International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Philadelphia, PA
DOI :
10.1109/ICDCS.2013.16