When Market Prices Drive the Load: Modeling, Grid-Security Analysis, and Mitigation of Data Center Workload Scheduling

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Pan, Shijie, Alexakis, Zaint A., Konstantinou, Charalambos
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Pan, Shijie
Alexakis, Zaint A.
Konstantinou, Charalambos
author_facet Pan, Shijie
Alexakis, Zaint A.
Konstantinou, Charalambos
contents Data centers (DCs) are emerging as large, geographically distributed, controllable loads whose participation in electricity markets can significantly affect grid operation, especially when cloud platforms shift workloads across sites to exploit energy-arbitrage opportunities. This paper analyzes and seeks to mitigate the grid impacts of geographically distributed multi-site DCs under exogenous electricity prices. It develops a detailed job-level scheduling framework for market-driven DCs, formulated as a mixed-integer model that preserves execution logic and captures a unified set of implementable control actions. It also incorporates service-side quality-of-service (QoS) constraints and penalty terms to improve fidelity. Case studies on a modified IEEE 14-bus system, complemented by a more realistic network based on Travis County, Texas, show that purely price-driven scheduling improves economic performance, but also increases voltage-security risk and congestion exposure by inducing localized demand concentration and sharp site-level load variation. To mitigate these effects, this work introduces load-redistribution policies that curb extreme load shifting and support grid operators in managing such conditions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_06924
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle When Market Prices Drive the Load: Modeling, Grid-Security Analysis, and Mitigation of Data Center Workload Scheduling
Pan, Shijie
Alexakis, Zaint A.
Konstantinou, Charalambos
Systems and Control
Data centers (DCs) are emerging as large, geographically distributed, controllable loads whose participation in electricity markets can significantly affect grid operation, especially when cloud platforms shift workloads across sites to exploit energy-arbitrage opportunities. This paper analyzes and seeks to mitigate the grid impacts of geographically distributed multi-site DCs under exogenous electricity prices. It develops a detailed job-level scheduling framework for market-driven DCs, formulated as a mixed-integer model that preserves execution logic and captures a unified set of implementable control actions. It also incorporates service-side quality-of-service (QoS) constraints and penalty terms to improve fidelity. Case studies on a modified IEEE 14-bus system, complemented by a more realistic network based on Travis County, Texas, show that purely price-driven scheduling improves economic performance, but also increases voltage-security risk and congestion exposure by inducing localized demand concentration and sharp site-level load variation. To mitigate these effects, this work introduces load-redistribution policies that curb extreme load shifting and support grid operators in managing such conditions.
title When Market Prices Drive the Load: Modeling, Grid-Security Analysis, and Mitigation of Data Center Workload Scheduling
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.06924