Integrated Power Management of Data Centers and Electric Vehicles for Energy and Regulation Market Participation

Large scale data centers and Plug-in Electric Vehicles (PEVs) are valuable assets that can be used to balance power grid frequency by adjusting their power consumption. This paper considers the joint power management of a data center and the PEVs of its employees for frequency regulation. The problem involves designing a real-time power control strategy for the integrated assets to collectively track the assigned frequency regulation signal, as well as developing a market planning strategy that determines the best baseload and capacity (regulation up/down) values over a multi-hour operating period to minimize energy cost and maximize regulation service revenue. A two-layer hierarchical power management framework is proposed, which enables a systematic design of both the tracking control and market planning problems. The proposed framework is evaluated based on real workload, regulation signal, and market data. The simulation results indicate that the regulation signal can be accurately tracked, and our scheme outperforms other designs that manage different regulation assets separately.