Greening multi-tenant data center demand response

Data centers have emerged as promising resources for demand response, particularly for emergency demand response (EDR), which saves the power grid from incurring blackouts during emergency situations. However, currently, data centers typically participate in EDR by turning on backup (diesel) generators, which is both expensive and environmentally unfriendly. In this paper, we focus on “greening” demand response in multi-tenant data centers, i.e., colocation data centers, by designing a pricing mechanism through which the data center operator can efficiently extract load reductions from tenants during emergency periods for EDR. In particular, we propose a pricing mechanism for both mandatory and voluntary EDR programs, ColoEDR, that is based on parameterized supply function bidding and provides provably near-optimal efficiency guarantees, both when tenants are pricetaking and when they are price-anticipating. In addition to analytic results, we extend the literature on supply funct...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: PE
• Authors: Niangjun Chen, Xiaoqi Ren, Shaolei Ren, Adam Wierman
• Keywords: Optimization, PE 2015