Datacenter Demand Response for Carbon Mitigation: From Concept to Practicality : Invited Paper

Datacenters could greatly improve their sustainability by shifting their power usage across time in response to electricity’s carbon intensity. However, despite decades of research, modulating demand in response to grid signals has not been deployed in wide practice. We review diverse studies and real-world practices to understand the reasons for the gap between concept and reality, identifying several significant challenges. Demand response frameworks (i) are often too complex, (ii) break abstraction layers in datacenter management, (iii) place too much emphasis on batch processing jobs, (iv) lack dynamic strategies, and (v) provide insufficient incentives for datacenter operators and users. Overcoming these challenges is essential to making datacenter demand response a reality, which would lead to sustainable, efficient computing.