Waste heat reutilization and integrated demand response for decentralized optimization of data centers

In recent years, the energy consumption of data centers (DCs) has increased rapidly. Since the demand response (DR) capability of DCs is considerable, DCs play an important role in DR programs. In this work, we further focus on the DCs' integrated demand response (IDR) capability which owes to its temporally and spatially shiftable electricity and heat. To make full use of waste heat retained in the coolant, we design a waste heat recovery process for waste heat reutilization. Moreover, we propose a decentralized optimization algorithm based on the alternating direction multiplier method (ADMM) to protect the inner sensitive data of DCs. Numerical results show that energy purchase costs can be effectively reduced for DCs with IDR capability. It is also proved that the reutilized waste heat constitutes an important part of the heat supply. Besides, the convergence performance of the proposed algorithm is verified based on large quantities of simulations. •Design a waste heat recovery process for waste heat reutilization in data centers.•Construct an integrated demand response model of data centers to reduce daily costs.•Propose an ADMM-based decentralized optimization algorithm to protect the inner sensitive data of data centers.