A Control Co-Design Framework to Optimize Sustainability with Application to Microgrid-Driven Data Centers

Abstract

This work studies the optimization of physical plant characteristics and controller parameters for sustainability. Environmental sustainability is strongly correlated with the development and operation of energy systems, with data centers as the preeminent modern example. Data centers, and the grid technologies that provide their power, consume nonnegligible amounts of global energy and pose a risk to increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and electronic waste. Addressing such issues requires improved plant design and control strategies, often approached through optimization-based methods. However, there are noticeable gaps regarding data center and microgrid design: (i) simultaneous optimization of plant and controller features is rarely explored, and (ii) sustainability criteria are not emphasized. This work addresses these gaps by establishing a generalized, sustainability-centric control co-design (CCD) framework for energy systems. Uniquely, the CCD framework defines and categorizes sustainability metrics into three lifecycle stages - manufacturing, operation, and disposal - supporting optimization and comparative analysis of the metrics for different design options. To exemplify its use, the CCD framework is applied to a microgrid-driven data center system, providing a family of sustainability metrics correlated to plant and controller parameters. The analysis enabled by the framework provides insights into the CCD of microgrids and data centers, such as that GHG-equivalent emissions from manufacturing of components can dwarf those generated during operation of the system. The system designs identified by the proposed framework show substantial improvements to environmental sustainability categories as compared to designs identified through baseline procedures.