Greening Multi-Tenant Data Center Demand Response

Data centers have emerged as promising resources for demand response, particularly for emergency demand response (EDR), which saves the power grid from incurring blackouts during emergency situations. However, currently, data centers typically participate in EDR by turning on backup (diesel) generators, which is both expensive and environmentally unfriendly. In this paper, we focus on "greening" demand response in multi-tenant data centers, i.e., colocation data centers, by designing a pricing mechanism through which the data center operator can efficiently extract load reductions from tenants during emergency periods to fulfill energy reduction requirement for EDR. In particular, we propose a pricing mechanism for both mandatory and voluntary EDR programs, ColoEDR, that is based on parameterized supply function bidding and provides provably near-optimal efficiency guarantees, both when tenants are price-taking and when they are price-anticipating. In addition to analytic results, we extend the literature on supply function mechanism design, and evaluate ColoEDR using trace-based simulation studies. These validate the efficiency analysis and conclude that the pricing mechanism is both beneficial to the environment and to the data center operator (by decreasing the need for backup diesel generation), while also aiding tenants (by providing payments for load reductions).Comment: 34 pages, 6 figure

South Bronx Residents Solution on Greening our 'hood

The South Bronx has struggled for years with three of the most pressing social and economic inequities that affect urban, low-income communities of color: high unemployment, poor public health, and substandard housing conditions. Compared with other neighborhoods in New York City, the South Bronx community bears an unequal share of the burden in each of these areas. The South Bronx is home to the highest unemployment rate in the city at 12.6%, claims one of the highest rates of asthma and obesity in the country, and residents are exposed to housing infested with cockroaches, mold and other allergens at a higher rate than anywhere else in the City.After a year-long community visioning process, where members of MOM identified the need to address the intersecting issues of housing, environmental injustice and unemployment, members of MOM decided to research a public policy solution that could address each of these interrelated issues simultaneously. This solution is a green jobs program, which we define as employment opportunities that improve the environment. After surveying hundreds of residents in the South Bronx, and exploring a variety of existing and proposed green jobs programs found in New York and elsewhere throughout the country, members of MOM have decided to call for the creation of a green jobs program focused in the New York City Housing Authority to retrofit each of the South Bronx neighborhood's 90 public housing developments to be more energy efficient. If implemented successfully, this green jobs program could create thousands of new jobs while simultaneously improving public health and housing conditions for low-income South Bronx residents

Competitive Bandwidth Reservation via Cloud Brokerage for Video Streaming Applications

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GREENING DATA CENTRES: THE MOTIVATION, EXPECTANCY AND ABILITY DRIVERS

Data centres are the backbone of the digital economy and the widespread adoption of cloud services, business analytics and big data will continu to accelerate their demand. Because data centres consume a significant amount of energy, research efforts are needed to identify what facilitates actions to implement practices and technologies to either retrofit to or architect green data centres. This paper address this issu drawing from institutional, expectancy and motivation “ability theories and based on survey data collected from 96 data centres. The findings indicate that performance and effort expectancy form the strong order drivers and together with ability will lead to the implementation of practices and technologies that improve the energy efficiency of data centres. In addition, institutional isomorphic forces serve as first order influnces to shape expectations and trigger actions to develop skills and polices and to allocate financial resources that facilitate the implementation of greening practices. The paper further discusses a number of implications for research and practice

Nonprofit Strategies for 1- to 4-Unit REO Properties: An Analytical Framework

Real estate owned (REO) housing resulting from the recent foreclosure crisis threatens to destabilize low- and moderate-income neighborhoods across the country. Nonprofit organiza-tions seeking to redevelop these properties into affordable housing face weak market condi-tions and operate with limited resources and capacity. This study presents a framework through which nonprofits can analyze REO redevelopment opportunities for 1- to 4-unit properties within their communities. The paper specifies the conditions necessary for REO redevelopment and discusses how local market conditions, the geographic distribution and the physical characteristics of REOs, their ownership and legal status, internal organizational capacity, and public policies each affect nonprofit efforts to acquire, rehabilitate, sell and rent REO properties. Finally, this paper considers the unique difficulties of the current situation relative to past vacant-housing scenarios and concludes that many nonprofits may wish to pursue alternative, non-redevelopment strategies

A Report Card for the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA): Residents' Evaluation of NYCHA and Recommendations for Improvement

From May 2010 through April 2011, members of five community organizations, CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, Community Voices Heard (CVH), Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE), Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), and Mothers on the Move (MOM), with support from the Community Development Project (CDP) of the Urban Justice Center, collected 1,446 report cards that asked public housing residents to "grade" the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). Residents graded NYCHA--using a traditional letter grading scale--on management, the centralized calling center, repairs, and maintenance of buildings and developments. Public housing residents were involved in every stage of the research and participated in the development of report card questions, research findings, and policy recommendations. NYCHA received failing grades in 10 of the 26 categories

Extending Demand Response to Tenants in Cloud Data Centers via Non-intrusive Workload Flexibility Pricing

Participating in demand response programs is a promising tool for reducing energy costs in data centers by modulating energy consumption. Towards this end, data centers can employ a rich set of resource management knobs, such as workload shifting and dynamic server provisioning. Nonetheless, these knobs may not be readily available in a cloud data center (CDC) that serves cloud tenants/users, because workloads in CDCs are managed by tenants themselves who are typically charged based on a usage-based or flat-rate pricing and often have no incentive to cooperate with the CDC operator for demand response and cost saving. Towards breaking such "split incentive" hurdle, a few recent studies have tried market-based mechanisms, such as dynamic pricing, inside CDCs. However, such mechanisms often rely on complex designs that are hard to implement and difficult to cope with by tenants. To address this limitation, we propose a novel incentive mechanism that is not dynamic, i.e., it keeps pricing for cloud resources unchanged for a long period. While it charges tenants based on a Usage-based Pricing (UP) as used by today's major cloud operators, it rewards tenants proportionally based on the time length that tenants set as deadlines for completing their workloads. This new mechanism is called Usage-based Pricing with Monetary Reward (UPMR). We demonstrate the effectiveness of UPMR both analytically and empirically. We show that UPMR can reduce the CDC operator's energy cost by 12.9% while increasing its profit by 4.9%, compared to the state-of-the-art approaches used by today's CDC operators to charge their tenants

Advances in green leases and green leasing: evidence from Sweden, Australia, and the UK

Improving the environmental performance of non-domestic buildings is a complex problem due to the participation of multiple stakeholders. This is particularly challenging in tenanted spaces, where landlord and tenant interactions are regulated through leases that traditionally ignore environmental considerations. ‘Green leasing’ has been conceptualized as a form of ‘middle-out’ inter-organisational environmental governance that operates between organisations, alongside other drivers. Green leases form a valuable framework for tenant–landlord cooperation within properties and across portfolios. This paper offers a comparative international investigation of how leases are evolving to become ‘greener’ in Sweden, Australia, and the UK, drawing on experience from an IEA project on behaviour change and a UK project on energy strategy development. It considers how stakeholder retrofit opportunities and interactions in non-domestic buildings are shaped by the (1) policy context in each country (e.g., the EPBD, NABERS, and MEES) and (2) prevailing leasing practices in each country. Based on this analysis, the paper develops a new market segmentation framework to accentuate the different roles that public sector organisations and private property companies play as both tenants and landlords across countries. We suggest that national government policies assist the public sector in leading on better leasing practices, whereas international certification and benchmarking schemes (e.g., BREEAM & GRESB) may provide more fuel to private sector tenants and landlords. The paper concludes with a discussion of the fit between property portfolios and policies, suggesting that international green lease standards might assist multinational tenants and property owners in upgrading both their premises and their operational practices