1.School of Electric Power Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China;2.Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong 999077, China

The data center, due to its adjustable load at both spatial and temporal scales, can be regarded as a huge and highly potential new demand response resource, and is an industrial case of virtual power plants. However, in existing studies of data center economic dispatch, environmental benefits and computing experience for renters have not been fully considered, and the evaluation of execution effectiveness after demand response has been mostly neglected. Thus, a low-carbon economic dispatch scheme for multiple data centers based on spatio-temporal collaboration is proposed. Firstly, the spatio-temporal adjustable characteristics of data center workloads are modeled to clarify the specific realization path of demand response and renewable energy accommodation. Secondly, the renter satisfaction for demand response is quantified to ensure the user-side service experience. The carbon trading cost is introduced into the objective function to guide the source side in reducing carbon emissions. Finally, the case study is conducted using typical data of data center in the day-ahead invitation demand response mode in Guangdong electricity market, China. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can effectively stimulate the spatio-temporal regulation potential for flexible resources of data centers and achieve overall economic improvement while considering environmental benefits and renter satisfaction.

This work is supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52177087) and Postdoctoral Fellowship Program of CPSF (No. GZC20230834).