Volume 46: Energy Transitions toward Carbon Neutrality: Part IX

Optimizing Waste Heat Utilization from Small-scale Data Centers in Multi-Energy Building Systems Bürgler Florian, Humbert Gabriele, Heer Philipp, Koirala Binod Prasad

Abstract

Power consumption from data centers is envisioned to drastically increase in future energy systems. A large share of this power consumption will be, inevitably, converted into heat, proving a huge potential for waste heat recovery opportunities. This work investigates the optimal integration of waste heat recovery from small-scale edge data centers into buildings. A case study using the real-data from NEST building at Dübendorf, Swizterland, is conducted. The results indicate that smaller data centers exhibit better cost optimization. Within the boundary conditions of NEST case study, the self-consumed heat fraction decreases with increasing data center size, and the influence of daily flexibility on heat consumption is negligible.

Keywords waste heat recovery, data center, optimization, cost minimization, emission minimization, buildings.