Real-time power control of data centers for providing Regulation Service

Data centers account for 3% of the national electricity consumption today. Recent advances in power capping enable data centers to provide Regulation Service (RS) reserves to power markets. RS reserve requirements are expected to increase with the integration of substantial environmentally sustainable, albeit volatile and intermittent, renewable generation. We investigate the ability of server clusters to provide RS reserves while meeting contractual Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees for user applications running on the cluster. We propose a dynamic server power regulation policy for processing randomly arriving applications within probabilistic QoS constraints while tracking dynamically broadcasted RS requests by the power market Independent System Operator (ISO). Numerical results demonstrate the ability to select optimal RS reserve and average energy consumption levels that allow data centers to both deliver probabilistic QoS guarantees to customers and track real time ISO RS requests. Finally, we argue that simulated optimal policy performance statistics can enable data centers to bid for energy and to offer RS reserves in the the hour-ahead power markets.