Low-Carbon Operation of Data Centers With Joint Workload Sharing and Carbon Allowance Trading

Abstract

Data centers (DCs) have witnessed rapid growth due to the proliferation of cloud computing and internet services. The huge electricity demand and the associated carbon emissions of DCs have great impacts on power system reliability and environmental sustainability. This paper proposes a bilevel model for low-carbon operation of DCs via carbon-integrated locational marginal prices (CLMPs). In the upper level, the power system operator sequentially solves the optimal power flow and the carbon emission flow problems to determine the CLMPs. In the lower level, a joint workload sharing and carbon trading model for DCs is developed to minimize their overall operation cost while keeping each DC's carbon footprint within its carbon allowance. To solve the bilevel model and preserve the privacy of DCs, we propose a bisection-embedded iterative method. It can tackle the issue of oscillation, thereby ensuring convergence. In addition, a filtering mechanism-based distributed algorithm is proposed to solve the lower-level DC problem in a distributed manner with much reduced communication overhead. Case studies on both small-scale and large-scale systems demonstrate the effectiveness and benefits of the proposed method.