Exploring the Potential Benefits of Demand Response in Small Data Centers

Demand Response (DR) is often regarded as the killer application of the emerging smart grid. Recently, the rapidly growing Internet population aggrandizes the size and the number of data centers. The energy issues of data centers have drawn a lot of attention lately. The programmable workload dispatching and scheduling of modern servers make data centers auspicious candidates with great potential for DR. However, studies of small data centers participating in DR programs are still inadequate, since existing studies usually focus on energy efficiency issues for the large dedicated server farms. Besides large server farms, small data centers scattered in academic or research environments also consume considerable amount of energy. Unlike commercial data centers that must meet rigorous reliability and availability requirements, small data centers are typically not mission critical. Such data centers are the most likely prospects for participating in DR programs. This study examines the power consumption recorded by smart meters from an on-campus small data center, and explorers the potential benefits for small data centers participating in DR programs. In the end, this study finds that the potential achievable DR power reduction of all on-campus small data centers in Taiwan can be in the range of 10.8 MW to 27 MW.