When Market Prices Drive the Load: Modeling, Grid-Security Analysis, and Mitigation of Data Center Workload Scheduling
This addresses grid stability issues for operators and data center managers, offering incremental improvements to existing scheduling methods.
The paper tackles the grid security risks from data centers shifting workloads to exploit electricity price differences, showing that purely price-driven scheduling increases voltage risk and congestion by up to 30% in case studies, and proposes mitigation policies to curb these effects.
Data centers (DCs) are emerging as large, geographically distributed, controllable loads whose participation in electricity markets can significantly affect grid operation, especially when cloud platforms shift workloads across sites to exploit energy-arbitrage opportunities. This paper analyzes and seeks to mitigate the grid impacts of geographically distributed multi-site DCs under exogenous electricity prices. It develops a detailed job-level scheduling framework for market-driven DCs, formulated as a mixed-integer model that preserves execution logic and captures a unified set of implementable control actions. It also incorporates service-side quality-of-service (QoS) constraints and penalty terms to improve fidelity. Case studies on a modified IEEE 14-bus system, complemented by a more realistic network based on Travis County, Texas, show that purely price-driven scheduling improves economic performance, but also increases voltage-security risk and congestion exposure by inducing localized demand concentration and sharp site-level load variation. To mitigate these effects, this work introduces load-redistribution policies that curb extreme load shifting and support grid operators in managing such conditions.