Data center demand response: Avoiding the coincident peak via workload shifting and local generation

Demand response is a crucial aspect of the future smart grid. It has the potential to provide significant peak demand reduction and to ease the incorporation of renewable energy into the grid. Data centers’ participation in demand response is becoming increasingly important given their high and increasing energy consumption and their flexibility in demand management compared to conventional industrial facilities. In this paper, we study two demand response schemes to reduce a data center’s peak loads and energy expenditure: workload shifting and the use of local power generation. We conduct a detailed characterization study of coincident peak data over two decades from Fort Collins Utilities, Colorado and then develop two algorithms for data centers by combining workload scheduling and local power generation to avoid the coincident peak and reduce the energy expenditure. The first algorithm optimizes the expected cost and the second one provides a good worst-case guarantee for any coincident peak pattern, workload demand and renewable generation prediction error distributions. We evaluate these algorithms via numerical simulations based on real world traces from production systems. The results show that using workload shifting in combination with local generation can provide significant cost savings (up to 40% under the Fort Collins Utilities charging scheme) compared to either alone.