A Stochastic Optimal Control Approach for Exploring Tradeoffs between Cost Savings and Battery Aging in Datacenter Demand Response

This brief paper optimizes power management for datacenters employing lithium-ion battery storage, with the specific goal of addressing the tradeoff between: 1) the cost saving achievable through the peak demand shaving and 2) the corresponding battery aging. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this tradeoff has never been addressed using physics-based models of battery performance and degradation combined with stochastic models of datacenter demand. We build: 1) a Markov chain model of datacenter power demand; 2) a second-order model of battery diffusion/reaction dynamics; and 3) a physics-based model of battery aging via solid electrolyte interphase growth. Together, these models enable the solution of the battery health-conscious demand response problem via stochastic dynamic programming (SDP). A penalty function is used for enforcing a datacenter “power cap” within this SDP problem. By varying this power cap, we traverse the Pareto tradeoff between the cost savings due to demand response and battery health degradation.