Aggregation-Based Datacenter Energy Management in Wholesale Electricity Markets

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.