Joint optimization of operational cost and carbon emission in multiple data center micro-grids

Abstract

As the internet data centers are mushrooming, the energy consumption and carbon emission of data centers are increasing rapidly. To cut down the electricity cost and carbon emission of the data centers, we proposed an optimization method to reduce the electricity cost and carbon emission in geo-distributed multiple data centers. In the proposed method, the carbon tax is considered in the overall operation cost to optimize the carbon emission. The spatial and temporal flexibility of computational workload is fully utilized by considering the difference in renewable energy power output, local electricity and carbon emission of multiple geo-distributed data centers to achieve a better performance. Furthermore, the nonlinear characteristics of the power loss of uninterruptible power supply (UPS) are considered in the optimization. To verify the proposed optimization method, simulation of six cases is carried out with realistic data, and results have proved the proposed method can reduce the operational costs by 4.93%–12.7% and decrease carbon emissions by up to 10%.