Towards the design and operation of net-zero energy data centers
Martin F. Arlitt, Cullen E. Bash, Sergey Blagodurov, Yuan Chen, Tom Christian, Daniel Gmach, Chris Hyser, Niru Kumari, Zhenhua Liu, Manish Marwah, Alan McReynolds, Chandrakant D. Patel, Amip J. Shah, Zhikui Wang, Rongliang Zhou · 2012
Reduction of resource consumption in data centers is becoming a growing concern for data center designers, operators and users. Accordingly, interest in the use of renewable energy to provide some portion of a data center's overall energy usage is also growing. One key concern is that the amount of renewable energy necessary to satisfy a typical data center's power consumption can lead to prohibitively high capital costs for the power generation and delivery infrastructure, particularly if on-site renewables are used. In this paper, we introduce a method to operate a data center with renewable energy that minimizes dependence on grid power while minimizing capital cost. We achieve this by integrating data center demand with the availability of resource supplies during operation. We discuss results from the deployment of our method in a production data center.