End-to-End Learning-based Operation of Integrated Energy Systems for Buildings and Data Centers

TL;DR

This paper presents an end-to-end learning approach for optimizing integrated energy systems in buildings and data centers, leveraging waste heat recovery and joint operation to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Contribution

It introduces a unified learning framework that directly optimizes operational performance under uncertainty, integrating prediction and decision-making for the first time in this context.

Findings

Operational performance improved by 7-9% over traditional methods.

Waste heat recovery reduces total energy costs by approximately 10%.

Joint operation of buildings and data centers yields substantial economic benefits.

Abstract

Buildings and data centers (DCs) are energy-intensive sectors, playing a critical role to achieve the low-carbon and sustainable energy transition targets. To this end, integrated energy system (IES) that incorporates diverse renewables, energy generation, conversion, and storage technologies to enable coordinated multi-energy supply have been widely investigated for both buildings and DCs. However, few works consider the two sectors jointly within IES to exploit their substantial synergistic benefits. Meanwhile, the operational optimization of IES remains challenging due to the difficulty to predict the multi-energy demand and supply accurately. To address these gaps, this paper investigates IES for coordinated multi-energy supply of buildings and DC, where the waste heat from DCs is recovered and reused to enhance energy efficiency. Moreover, an end-to-end learning-based method is proposed for the operational optimization of IES under uncertainty. Unlike conventional predict-then-optimize approaches, the proposed method integrates the training of prediction models for uncertain variables with the constrained optimization of IES into a unified learning framework, guiding the training of prediction models to improve operational performance, rather than prediction accuracy, thereby mitigating the impacts of predictions errors. Case studies based on real-world datasets show that the proposed methods improves the operational performance of IES by about 7-9% compared to existing predict-then-optimize methods. In addition, coordinating buildings and DCs within IES shows substantial economic benefits. In particular, the waste heat recovery from DCs leads to approximately 10% of total energy cost reduction of the IES.