Optimization of building thermal and electrical energy consumption through heat recovery from cryptocurrency miners

Energy harvesting has emerged as a key strategy for enhancing sustainability and improving efficiency in modern energy systems. In parallel, cryptocurrency mining and other high-performance computing applications are characterized by significant electricity demand and substantial waste heat generation, offering a promising opportunity for integrated energy recovery and management. This study develops a Smart Building Energy Management System (SBEMS) that models cryptocurrency mining devices (CMDs) as both flexible, price-responsive electrical loads and controllable thermal energy resources. By exploiting the adjustable power consumption of CMDs and their waste heat recovery potential, the proposed framework enables coordinated operation of mining activities with renewable energy generation, thermal energy storage, battery energy storage systems and electric vehicle charging systems to improve overall building energy performance. Four operating scenarios are investigated, including a baseline system without CMDs, controllable CMD operation without heat recovery, controllable CMD operation with heat recovery, and uncontrolled always-on mining with heat recovery. Seasonal simulations are conducted for representative winter, spring, summer, and autumn conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed SBEMS-based controllable heat-recovery strategy consistently achieves the lowest operating cost across all seasons. Compared with uncontrolled always-on mining, the proposed strategy reduces operating cost by 4.4% in winter, 6.6% in spring, 5.6% in summer, and 6.6% in autumn. In addition, CMD electricity consumption is reduced by 57.55% on average compared with the always-on operation. These findings confirm that the proposed control strategy reduces unnecessary mining operation while enabling effective utilization of waste heat within a coordinated multienergy framework.