Renewable and Clean Energy for Data Centers
William Tze Ming Kao · 2014
With the tremendous growth of the Internet, social media, and cloud-based computing, all the information generated—videos, audios, emails, status updates, news, and tweets—ends up in giant data processing facilities called data centers. This chapter provides a summary of renewable energy technologies, focusing primarily on those used to power data centers (solar, wind, hydropower, and geothermal). At the same time, to remedy some of renewable energy limitations (solar and wind energy intermittency), fuel cell technology is discussed. Fuel cells provide compact, quiet, and reliable baseload power in Distributed generation (DG) and on-site power generation. The chapter discusses what various large corporations are embarking to make their data centers more green and efficient through the use of clean technology.