While Mahan does not discuss power-purchase agreement, he does agree that the growing demand for IT services and compute-intensive applications needs energy efficiency gains. He writes, “This means that investments in energy-efficient technologies like next-gen heat removal, computing and storage will be a necessity to avoid steep energy consumption growth in the future.” Grid participation Despite the intense focus by energyproducing companies on solar, Bunger said renewable sources are incapable of providing the energy consumption needed to fuel data centers. “A data center is extremely energy intensive,” he explained. “It has a very small footprint and produces a lot of heat. Solar just is not there, yet.” In turn, data centers rely on some solar on the grid when making power-purchase agreements. “In most cases, data center operators will not have their own solar production, they won’t have their own solar farm,” he continued. Optimism in data center greening reigns because the electrical grid, from which the power-purchases are made, is getting better. Less of the electricity available on the grid is being produced through carbon fuels. However, Bunger cautioned that renewable energy can be “intermittent,” which means to store electricity on the grid, batteries need to be used to provide energy when the “sun’s not shining,” for example. Because of the way the electrical architecture is at a data centers, power storage is necessary. That is another reason Bunger recommends data center operators actually “become a participant in the grid to help enable more influence.” He explained the tendency is to think of data centers as a “consumer,” but if they become participants of the grid, they no longer are “just consuming energy, they are interacting with the grid, using their energy storage with the grid, which may add more renewables to the sourcing.” Going nuclear Another solution that may be on the horizon is the use of small modular reactors (SMRs), which are defined as “advanced nuclear reactors.” SMRs have a power capacity of up to 300 MW(e) per unit, which is about one-third of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear power reactors. Benefits of SMRs linked to the nature of their design – small and modular. Given their smaller footprint, SMRs can be manufactured and then shipped and installed on site, making them more affordable to build and can be customized for a particular location. They also can be deployed incrementally to match increasing energy demand. Bunger called it a “a very interesting idea,” because the SMRs are stable and carbon free. He acknowledged, however, nuclear is not renewable. In the meantime, there also remains the cooling of data centers. Those millions of gallons of water per day interacting with the heat data centers produce create steam. Unfortunately, the steam is not enough to help power the buildings. “All the electricity that goes into a data center turns into heat, but it is a low-grade heat,” Bunger explained. “It’s not boiling. It’s not super-hot air or water, so there are not too many direct uses of it.” However, in Europe some countries are considering legislation that in an area where heat is created – such as steam caused from cooling the data center– it must be connected to heat pumps to allow for at least some energy re-use. Despite the tremendous energy drains of data centers worldwide and the limited options that are available, Bunger remains positive about reaching the international goals that have been set for emissions, which are to reduce the 2010 global carbon dioxide emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and to reach net zero emissions by 2050. “I am optimistic we will meet the international goals for emissions mainly because of the biggest employers of data center infrastructure and the biggest suppliers have very strong goals,” he said. “There is no silver bullet that is going to get us there, but with the variety of solutions we have, the ways to get to the goal are increasing.” o CORE COMMUNICATIONS Tips to Improve Data Center Energy Usage, Efficiency C&C Technology’s Josh Mahan provides these general tips to improve data center usage and efficiency. • Reduce dependency on cooling • Experiment with temperature • Use a hot aisle/cold aisle layout for servers • Enclose or contain your server racks • Use general air flow improvement methods • Invest in retrofitting your AC units with variable speed fan drives • Install an air-side economizer • Adjust your data center’s humidity • Identify and remove zombie or comatose servers • Consolidate all lightly used servers • Virtualize your servers • Organize, delete and improve your stored data • Invest in more energy-efficient technologies • Decrease or optimize your data center’s space • Synchronize the server capacity and load of your equipment • Develop stronger, more reliable supplier partnerships 58 CHANNELVISION | JULY - AUGUST 2023
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