Learning from Optimal: Energy Procurement Strategies for Data Centers

Environmental concerns and rising grid prices have motivated data center owners to invest in on-site renewable energy sources. However, these sources present challenges as they are unreliable and intermittent. In an effort to mitigate these issues, data centers are incorporating energy storage systems. This introduces the opportunity for electricity bill reduction, as energy storage can be used for power market arbitrage. We present two supervised learning-based algorithms, LearnBuy, that learns the amount to purchase, and LearnStore, that learns the amount to store, to solve this energy procurement problem. These algorithms utilize the idea of "learning from optimal" by using the values generated by the offline optimization as a label for training. We test our algorithms on a general case, considering buying and selling back to the grid, and a special case, considering only buying from the grid. In the general case, LearnStore achieves a 10--16% reduction compared to baseline heuristics, whereas in the special case, LearnBuy achieves a 7% reduction compared to prior art.