A Fast Relax-and-Round Approach to Unit Commitment for Data Center Own Generation

The rapid growth of data centers increasingly requires data center operators to “bring own generation” to complement the available utility power plants to supply all or part of data center load. This practice sharply increases the number of generators on the bulk power system and shifts operational focus toward fuel costs rather than traditional startup and runtime constraints. Conventional mixed-integer unit commitment formulations are not well suited for systems with thousands of flexible, fast-cycling units. We propose a unit commitment formulation that relaxes binary commitment decisions by allowing generators to be fractionally on, enabling the use of algorithms for continuous solvers. We then use a rounding approach to get a feasible unit commitment. For a 276-unit system, solution time decreases from 10 hours to less than a second, with no accuracy degradation. Our approach scales with no issues to tens of thousands of generators, which allows solving problems on the scale of the major North America interconnections. The bulk of computation is parallel and GPU compatible, enabling further acceleration in future work.

💡 Research Summary

The paper addresses the emerging challenge of unit commitment (UC) for data‑center‑owned generation (DCOG), a scenario in which thousands of small‑to‑medium, fast‑cycling generators are added to the bulk power system. Traditional mixed‑integer programming (MIP) formulations, which treat the on/off status of each generator as a binary variable, become computationally intractable when the number of units reaches the scale typical of modern data‑center deployments. To overcome this limitation, the authors propose a “Relax‑and‑Round Unit Commitment” (RRUC) methodology that first relaxes the binary commitment variables to continuous values in the interval