An improved control method of district heating system based on waste heat utilization in data center

Abstract As essential infrastructure supporting artificial intelligence, data centers (DCs) are rapidly growing in both number and scale, leading to significant challenges with high energy consumption and carbon emissions. Since most of the electricity consumed by DCs is converted into waste heat (WH), recovering and utilizing this heat for urban district heating could contribute to achieving low-carbon cycle development for DCs. In this paper, the district heating system that integrated heat pumps and thermal storage was proposed to achieve efficient WH utilization of the DC. To further reduce the system’s operation costs, an improved control strategy was proposed based on the source-load characteristics of the system. The results demonstrated that, compared with the baseline control strategy, the net revenue of the system increased by 13.6% to 90.1%. Additionally, the thermal storage capacity configuration optimization was performed, revealing that the system investment return was optimal when the capacity was set to 40,000 kWh.