Energy management of Internet data centers in multiple local energy markets

Active distribution network Internet Data Centers (IDCs) are large energy consumers in modern distribution networks. The integration of renewable energy and energy storage systems transforms IDCs into proactive energy prosumers, and enables them to participate in the energy trading in regional local energy markets. This paper proposes an energy management framework for a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) that manages multiple geographically distributed IDCs. The framework provides decision-making support for the CSP to optimally schedule the IDCs' cyber-energy resources (computing requests, on-site battery energy storage systems, and on site renewable energy sources). In this way, the proposed framework facilitates the CSP to proactively participate in the local energy markets situated in the regions that host the IDCs, with the objective to minimize the CSP's total cost over a finite operation horizon. We use an effective evolutionary computation algorithm to solve the proposed energy management model and design extensive numerical simulations to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.