The Environmental Potential of Hyper-Scale Data Centers: Using Locational Marginal CO2 Emissions to Guide Geographical Load Shifting

dc.contributor.author Lindberg, Julia
dc.contributor.author Roald, Line
dc.contributor.author Lesieutre, Bernard
dc.date.accessioned 2020-12-24T19:38:48Z
dc.date.available 2020-12-24T19:38:48Z
dc.date.issued 2021-01-05
dc.description.abstract Increasing demand for computing has lead to the development of large-scale, highly optimized data centers, which represent large loads in the electric power network. Many major computing and internet companies operate multiple data centers spread geographically across the world. Thus, these companies have a unique ability to shift computing load, and thus electric load, geographically. This paper provides a "bottom-up" load shifting model which uses data centers' geographic load flexibility to lower CO2 emissions. This model utilizes information about the locational marginal CO2 footprint of the electricity at individual nodes, but does not require direct collaboration with the system operator. We demonstrate how to calculate marginal carbon emissions, and assess the efficacy of our approach compared to a setting where the data centers bid their flexibility into a centralized market. We find that data center load shifting can achieve substantial reductions in CO2 emissions even with modest load shifting.
dc.format.extent 10 pages
dc.identifier.doi 10.24251/HICSS.2021.384
dc.identifier.isbn 978-0-9981331-4-0
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10125/70999
dc.language.iso English
dc.relation.ispartof Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
dc.rights Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
dc.subject Distributed, Renewable, and Mobile Resources
dc.subject data centers
dc.subject flexible load
dc.subject load shifting
dc.title The Environmental Potential of Hyper-Scale Data Centers: Using Locational Marginal CO2 Emissions to Guide Geographical Load Shifting
prism.startingpage 3158
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