Peer-to-Peer Cloud Service Market for Data Centers Oriented to Computation-Electricity Coordination

Abstract

Energy-intensive data centers (DCs) have emerged as substantial and flexible loads in modern power systems, underscoring the critical need for computation-electricity coordination. Harnessing the spatio-temporal flexibility of DC workloads is a promising approach to facilitate this coordination. However, existing studies overlook the collaborative potential of computational resource sharing among geo-distributed DCs, thereby failing to fully unlock this flexibility. In this paper, a bi-level computation-electricity coordination framework is proposed to explicitly capture the bidirectional interactions between DCs and power grid. Firstly, a peer-to-peer cloud service market (P2P-CSM) for geo-distributed DCs is proposed, which enables bilateral cloud service transactions to leverage regional heterogeneities (e.g., electricity prices, cooling efficiency). Secondly, locational marginal prices are embedded into the framework to reflect network congestion and nodal price disparities. Thirdly, a dual consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based decentralized algorithm is developed as the P2P market clearing algorithm, and a bisection-assisted iterative algorithm is proposed to ensure rigorous convergence of the framework. Case studies conducted on modified IEEE 30-bus system validate that the P2P-CSM achieves a win-win computation-electricity coordination: it not only increases total DC operational profit by 22.8\%, but also effectively alleviates grid congestion and yields a 3.2\% reduction in total energy consumption.