Minimizing the effects of data centers on microgrid stability

With the integration of renewable energy sources and large-scale smart buildings, the electricity grid becomes more prone to instabilities due to unexpected fluctuations in energy consumption. Data centers are a type of smart building because of their innate automation and controllable load. Load controlling in data centers has been studied extensively with scheduling/migration, peak power shaving, load shifting, etc. However, previous studies have not considered how changes in data center power consumption may impact the stability of the electric grid. This paper first shows that well-known power management mechanisms in data centers may lead to voltage instability in the grid. We propose a new method that considers both workload performance constraints and minimizes the instability-causing effects on the grid. Our simulation studies show that our policy can preserve the grid stability 97% of the time and reduces the maximum instability observed by 27%, while effectively managing the workload performance.

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