ACM Sustainability Week @ Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada

The ACM Sustainability Week brought together the two flagship conferences of the ACM Special Interest Group on Energy (SIGEnergy): the ACM e-Energy Conference and the ACM BuildSys Conference. Both events focus on advancing research that supports the transition toward more sustainable energy systems, intelligent buildings, and resilient urban infrastructure. The week provided an excellent platform for interdisciplinary exchange, bringing together researchers from academia and industry working on topics ranging from energy-efficient computing and smart buildings to renewable energy integration and carbon-aware optimization.

As part of the conference program, we co-organized the 6th ACM International Workshop on Big Data and Machine Learning for Smart Buildings and Cities (BALANCES'26). During the workshop, we presented our paper, "Enhancing Urban Building Energy Models through Activity-Based Occupancy Generation", which explores how activity-based occupancy modeling can improve the realism and accuracy of urban-scale building energy simulations.

In addition, we contributed to the Energy Efficient Data Center Workshop with our paper, "Projecting the Consequences of Climate Change on the Operation of European Data Centers", which investigates the long-term impacts of climate change on data center operations and energy demand across Europe.

Finally, we presented our latest research in the main technical program of the ACM e-Energy Conference with the paper "Carbon-Aware Cooling Demand Optimization of Cold Storage Warehouses Utilizing Inherent Thermal Storage". The work demonstrates how the thermal flexibility of cold storage facilities can be leveraged to reduce carbon emissions by aligning electricity consumption with periods of lower grid carbon intensity.

Overall, ACM Sustainability Week offered an inspiring opportunity to exchange ideas, discuss emerging research directions, and strengthen collaborations with researchers from around the world who are working toward a more sustainable energy future. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Bundesministerium für Forschung, Transformation und Raumfahrt (BMFTR), whose funding made this research and our participation in ACM Sustainability Week possible.