Electric grid balancing through lowcost workload migration

Energy production must continuously match demand on the electric grid. A deficiency can lead to service disruptions, and a surplus can place tremendous stress on grid components, potentially causing major blackouts. To manage this balance, grid operators must increase or lower power generation, with only a few minutes to react. The grid balancing problem has also impeded the pace of integrating bountiful renewable resources (e.g., wind), whose generation is intermittent. An emerging plan to mitigate this problem is demand response, i.e., for grid operators to alter the electricity usage behavior of the masses through real-time price signals. But due to prohibitively high infrastructure costs and societal-scale adoption, tangible demand response mechanisms have so far been elusive. We believe that altering the usage patterns of a multitude of data centers can be a tangible, albeit initial, step towards affecting demand response. Growing in both density and size, today's data center designs are shaped by the increasing awareness of energy costs and carbon footprint. We posit that shifting computational workloads (and thus, demand) across geographic regions to match electricity supply may help balance the grid. In this paper we will first present a real grid balancing problem experienced in the Pacfic Northwest. We then propose a symbiotic relationship between data centers and grid operators by showing that mutual cost benefits can be accessible. Finally, we argue for a low cost workload migration mechanism, and pose overarching challenges in designing this framework.