Optimal Pricing Strategy for Data Center Considering Demand Response and Renewable Energy Source Accommodation

Abstract

With the continuous development of information technology, data centers (DCs) consume significant and ever-growing amounts of electrical energy. Renewable energy sources (RESs) can act as clean solutions to meet this requirement without polluting the environment. Each DC serves numerous users for their data service demands, which are regarded as flexible loads. In this paper, the willingness to pay and time sensitivities of DC users are firstly explored, and the user-side demand response is then devised to improve the overall benefits of DC operation. Then, a Stackelberg game between a DC and its users is proposed. The upper-level model aims to maximize the profit of the DC, in which the time-varying pricing of data services is optimized, and the lower-level model addresses user's optimal decisions for using data services while balancing their time and cost requirements. The original bi-level optimization problem is then transformed into a single-level problem using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker optimality conditions and strong duality theory, which enables the problem to be solved efficiently. Finally, case studies are conducted to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, as well as the effects of the time-varying data service price mechanism on the RES accommodation.

Keywords

• Data center (DC)
• demand response (DR)
• pricing strategy
• renewable energy source (RES)
• Stackelberg game