Coordinated Energy Management for Emergency Demand Response in Mixed-Use Buildings

Abstract

Both buildings and datacenters have emerged as critical resources for demand response, especially for emergency demand response (EDR) that helps avoid cascading failures during emergency events. Nonetheless, although the majority of datacenters are physically located in mixed-use buildings (MUBs) and share the main electrical power line with other operation (e.g., office) in the same MUB, the existing studies on demand response by buildings and datacenters have been largely isolated to date and resulted in uncoordinated energy management: research on building demand response treats datacenter operation as miscellaneous loads, whereas datacenter demand response considers dedicated datacenters. To overcome the uncoordination between datacenter and non-datacenter operation, we propose a first-of-its-kind coordinated approach to enabling EDR in MUBs, such that the total incurred loss (e.g., latency performance degradation for datacenter, thermal discomfort for office) is minimized for energy shedding during EDR. We present a distributed and coordinated energy management (DCEM) solution that can optimally control indoor temperature for non- datacenter space, server provisioning and load balancing in datacenter, and usage of diesel generation. We also conduct a case study to validate our coordinated approach and the results show that DCEM can reduce the MUB cost up to 41 % compared to the standard EDR approach using only backup genearator.