Coordinated Optimization Scheduling of Data Center and Electricity Retailer Based on Cooperative Game Theory

As the number of internet data centers (IDC) increases, the energy consumption of modern data centers is growing rapidly, which takes an increasing part of the global electricity consumption. In implementation, to cover the electricity consumption and reduce the electricity bill, data centers are often deployed with renewable energy, energy storage system (ESS) and conventional generators, which has brought the characteristics of both flexible electricity load and micro grid to the data centers. Therefore, the data center micro grids can adjust its operations according to the real time electricity price and cut down the operational cost. However, the rising of electricity will force the data center to start up the conventional generators, which leads to the incensement of operational cost and carbon tax. In view of this, we propose a coordinated operation scheduling method of data centers and electricity retailers based on cooperative game theory. In this method, a cooperative game union comprised of the data center and the electricity retailer is established to minimize the total cost. And the extra income of the alliance is distributed using the Shapley value method. A simulation is launched on Gurobi software, and the results have illustrated that the proposed method can reduce the data center operational cost by 5%.