Aggregation-Based Datacenter Energy Management in Wholesale Electricity Markets

TL;DR

This paper explores how datacenter groups can reduce energy costs in wholesale markets through aggregation, cooperative procurement, and cost sharing schemes, demonstrating significant benefits with real-world data.

Contribution

It introduces a cooperative game-theoretic model for datacenter energy procurement and proposes novel cost allocation schemes to distribute aggregation benefits.

Findings

Aggregation reduces power demand uncertainty.

Cooperative procurement yields cost savings.

Numerical experiments confirm benefits over noncooperative approaches.

Abstract

In this paper, we study how datacenter energy cost can be effectively reduced in the wholesale electricity market via cooperative power procurement. Intuitively, by aggregating workloads and renewables across a group of datacenters, the overall power demand uncertainty of datacenters can be reduced, resulting in less chance of being penalized when participating in the wholesale electricity market. We use cooperative game theory to model the cooperative electricity procurement process of datacenters as a cooperative game, and show the cost saving benefits of aggregation. Then, a cost allocation scheme based on the marginal contribution of each datacenter to the total expected cost is proposed to distribute the aggregation benefits among the participating datacenters. Besides, we propose proportional cost allocation scheme to distribute the aggregation benefits among the participating datacenters after realizations of power demand and market prices. Finally, numerical experiments based on real-world traces are conducted to illustrate the benefits of aggregation compared to noncooperative power procurement.