Data Center Demand Response in Deregulated Electricity Markets

Abstract

With the development of deregulated electricity markets, a customer can enter a contract with one of several competing utility companies. Meanwhile, a utility company is motivated to increase its market share by helping its customers manage their energy usage and save money through demand response programs. In this paper, we study the demand response program in deregulated electricity markets for data centers that often have significant flexibility in workload scheduling. We consider the real-time pricing and model the data centers’ coupled decisions of utility company choices and workload scheduling as a many-to-one matching game with externalities . To solve such a game, we show that it admits an exact potential function, whose local minima correspond to the stable outcomes of the game. We further develop a distributed algorithm that guarantees to converge to a stable outcome. Compared with the scenario without data centers’ demand response, we show through simulation that the proposed algorithm can reduce the average contract payment of data centers by 18.7% and increase the revenue of the utility companies that offer lower electricity tariffs up to 80% by attracting more data centers as customers.