Serving the Grid: an Experimental Study of Server Clusters as Real-Time Demand Response Resources

TL;DR

This study experimentally demonstrates that datacenters can serve as effective real-time demand response resources for the electric grid, showing their controllability, rapid response, and large dynamic range.

Contribution

It provides experimental evidence supporting datacenters as demand response resources and compares three software interfaces for power control within servers.

Findings

Datacenters can provide flexible, real-time demand response.

Experimental data shows fast power ramping capabilities.

Software interfaces differ in control effectiveness.

Abstract

Demand response is a crucial technology to allow large-scale penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources in the electric grid. This paper is based on the thesis that datacenters represent especially attractive candidates for providing flexible, real-time demand response services to the grid; they are capable of finely-controllable power consumption, fast power ramp-rates, and large dynamic range. This paper makes two main contributions: (a) it provides detailed experimental evidence justifying this thesis, and (b) it presents a comparative investigation of three candidate software interfaces for power control within the servers. All of these results are based on a series of experiments involving real-time power measurements on a lab-scale server cluster. This cluster was specially instrumented for accurate and fast power measurements on a time-scale of 100 ms or less. Our results provide preliminary evidence for the feasibility of large scale demand response using datacenters, and motivates future work on exploiting this capability.