Datacenters powered by renewable energy: A case study for 60 degrees latitude north
Enida Sheme, Neki Frashëri, Simon Holmbacka, Sébastien Lafond, Drazen Luzanin · 2016
Attention paid to energy efficiency in datacenters has been increasing significantly in the last decade. One of the latest trends on this issue is supplying datacenters with renewable energy, and reducing the carbon footprint of datacenters is a major step towards green computing. Following this trend, more and more datacenters are built in cold climate areas for cheaper cooling and increased energy efficiency of the facilities. However, such geographical locations have a very varying availability of renewable energy (especially solar energy), depending on the annual month and fitting the datacenters completely with renewable energy is hence more difficult. This paper analyzes the feasibility of using renewable energies for a datacenter located on the 60° latitude north. We analyze the energy consumption caused by the server workload and the cost-to-energy trade-off related to available wind and solar energy sources. A wind and solar power model is built based on real weather data for the city of Turku, Finland, and a feasibility study is conducted for fitting a datacenter with renewable energy sources on such a location. The available monthly and annual renewable energy is analyzed for different scenarios and compared with the energy consumption of a simulated datacenter. We also analyze the ratio between number of wind turbines and m2solar panel to achieve a desired fraction of renewable energy sources for a given datacenter.