An Ancillary Services Model for Data Centers and Power Systems

Abstract

Enormous energy consumption of data centers has a major impact on power systems by significantly increasing the electrical load. Due to the increase in electrical load, power systems are facing demand and supply miss-management problems. Therefore, power systems require efficient and intelligent ancillary services to maintain robustness, reliability, and stability. Data centers can provide the computational capabilities to manage power systems; however, data centers consume a tremendous amount of energy, and energy price accounts for a significant portion of their operational cost. Power system jobs will make this situation even more critical for data centers. In our work, we seek an Ancillary Services Model (ASM) to service data centers and power systems. In ASM, we find an optimal job scheduling technique for executing power systems’ jobs on data centers in terms of low power consumption, reduced makespan, and fewer preempted jobs. The power systems’ jobs include Optimal Power Flow (OPF) calculation, transmission line importance index, and bus importance index. Moreover, a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between data centers and power systems is shown to provide mutual benefits.