Energy-related Impact of Redefining Self-consumption for Distributed Edge Datacenters

Self-consumption is developing worldwide to increase renewable electricity consumption and reduce electricity bills. It can be carried out individually or collectively (grouping several entities), but is generally restricted geographically. In datacenters, one may use load shifting to benefit from the self-consumption tariffs, at the cost of increasing energy consumption. An alternative would be to extend the self-consumption rules to wider perimeters. This paper proposes a comparative study on several aspects influencing the collective self-consumption (CSC) of an Edge infrastructure, including spatial load shifting, temporal load shifting and extending the current rules to encompass wider geographical boundaries. Spatial shifting under the current CSC scheme is found more cost-effective (3.9% of cost reduction) with a negligible increase in energy consumption (0.19%), compared to the revised definition of collective self-consumption which leads to 3.7% cost reduction and no increase in energy consumption. Moreover, allowing up to 10% of the user tasks to be shifted in time can further increase the self-consumption rate by 1.3%.