Sustainable Evaluation and Optimization Based on Emergy Theory Perspective for Data Center Integrated Energy System

Serving as a crucial pathway and means for data centers to achieve energy conservation and emission reduction, the integrated energy system is currently empty of optimization and evaluation goals, and incomprehensive, hindering the improvement of its sustainability. To fully optimize the sustainability of data center integrated energy system, in this study, a system optimization goal for the energy sustainability was proposed for the first time using the energy theory from ecological analysis for reference. Firstly, an optimization model was established for the planning and scheduling of data center integrated energy system. And, multi-objective optimization was arranged to conducted using the NSGA-II algorithm with economic and carbon emission goals, and single-objective optimization was conducted taking the energy sustainability index as the target. Four optimization results were compared in terms of energy structure, indicators, and flow. The results show that the scheme optimized with energy sustainability index (ESI) as the target can yield ESI value of 0.4238, being higher than the other three schemes and possessing better sustainability. At the same time, its annual cost is 161.99 million yuan and its annual carbon emissions are 36,236 tons. Additionally, in conjunction with existing common evaluation indicators for data centers, the analysis emphasizes the importance of developing an integrated assessment framework for data center integrated energy system.