arXiv subjects

Bokan Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Bokan Chen.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

A Cherry-Picking Approach to Large Load Shaping for More Effective Carbon Reduction

Shaping multi-megawatt loads, such as data centers, impacts generator dispatch on the electric grid, which in turn affects system CO2 emissions and energy cost. Substantiating the effectiveness of prevalent load shaping strategies, such as those based on grid-level average carbon intensity, locational marginal price, or marginal emissions, is challenging due to the lack of detailed counterfactual data required for accurate attribution. This study uses a series of calibrated granular ERCOT day-ahead direct current optimal power flow (DC-OPF) simulations for counterfactual analysis of a broad set of load shaping strategies on grid CO2 emissions and cost of electricity. In terms of annual grid level CO2 emissions reductions, LMP-based shaping outperforms other common strategies, but can be significantly improved upon. Examining the performance of practicable strategies under different grid conditions motivates a more effective load shaping approach: one that "cherry-picks" a daily strategy based on observable grid signals and historical data. The cherry-picking approach to power load shaping is applicable to any large flexible consumer on the electricity grid, such as data centers, distributed energy resources and Virtual Power Plants (VPPs).

stat.ML↗

arXiv2021

Power Modeling for Effective Datacenter Planning and Compute Management

Datacenter power demand has been continuously growing and is the key driver of its cost. An accurate mapping of compute resources (CPU, RAM, etc.) and hardware types (servers, accelerators, etc.) to power consumption has emerged as a critical requirement for major Web and cloud service providers. With the global growth in datacenter capacity and associated power consumption, such models are essential for important decisions around datacenter design and operation. In this paper, we discuss two classes of statistical power models designed and validated to be accurate, simple, interpretable and applicable to all hardware configurations and workloads across hyperscale datacenters of Google fleet. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest scale power modeling study of this kind, in both the scope of diverse datacenter planning and real-time management use cases, as well as the variety of hardware configurations and workload types used for modeling and validation. We demonstrate that the proposed statistical modeling techniques, while simple and scalable, predict power with less than 5% Mean Absolute Percent Error (MAPE) for more than 95% diverse Power Distribution Units (more than 2000) using only 4 features. This performance matches the reported accuracy of the previous started-of-the-art methods, while using significantly less features and covering a wider range of use cases.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2021

Carbon-Aware Computing for Datacenters

The amount of CO$_2$ emitted per kilowatt-hour on an electricity grid varies by time of day and substantially varies by location due to the types of generation. Networked collections of warehouse scale computers, sometimes called Hyperscale Computing, emit more carbon than needed if operated without regard to these variations in carbon intensity. This paper introduces Google's system for Carbon-Intelligent Compute Management, which actively minimizes electricity-based carbon footprint and power infrastructure costs by delaying temporally flexible workloads. The core component of the system is a suite of analytical pipelines used to gather the next day's carbon intensity forecasts, train day-ahead demand prediction models, and use risk-aware optimization to generate the next day's carbon-aware Virtual Capacity Curves (VCCs) for all datacenter clusters across Google's fleet. VCCs impose hourly limits on resources available to temporally flexible workloads while preserving overall daily capacity, enabling all such workloads to complete within a day. Data from operation shows that VCCs effectively limit hourly capacity when the grid's energy supply mix is carbon intensive and delay the execution of temporally flexible workloads to "greener" times.

cs.DC↗

arXiv2018

A Holistic Approach to Forecasting Wholesale Energy Market Prices

Electricity market price predictions enable energy market participants to shape their consumption or supply while meeting their economic and environmental objectives. By utilizing the basic properties of the supply-demand matching process performed by grid operators, known as Optimal Power Flow (OPF), we develop a methodology to recover energy market's structure and predict the resulting nodal prices by using only publicly available data, specifically grid-wide generation type mix, system load, and historical prices. Our methodology uses the latest advancements in statistical learning to cope with high dimensional and sparse real power grid topologies, as well as scarce, public market data, while exploiting structural characteristics of the underlying OPF mechanism. Rigorous validations using the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) market data reveal a strong correlation between the grid level mix and corresponding market prices, resulting in accurate day-ahead predictions of real time prices. The proposed approach demonstrates remarkable proximity to the state-of-the-art industry benchmark while assuming a fully decentralized, market-participant perspective. Finally, we recognize the limitations of the proposed and other evaluated methodologies in predicting large price spike values.

stat.AP↗