Joint capacity planning and operational management for sustainable data centers and demand response
Tan N. Le, Zhenhua Liu, Yuan Chen, Cullen E. Bash · 2016
Reducing costs plays a crucial role in building and operating data centers. Internet service providers such as Facebook and Google spend billions of dollars on capacity expansion and operations of their global data centers. Traditionally, capacity planning for data centers is done separately from operational management, which incurs inefficiency. In fact, operational management has significant impacts on capacity planning. Motivated by this gap, we propose a framework that jointly optimizes both capacity planning and operational management for sustainable data centers and data centers participating in demand response programs. Numerical results based on real-world cases highlight that the proposed framework remarkably reduces up to 50% of total expenditures and 75% of greenhouse gas emissions compared to conventional methods. Additionally, our results show that participations in various demand response programs result in vastly different capacity planning decisions and lead to emission reductions of up to 60%.