The data center industry is continuously challenged with staying up to and sometimes ahead of the ever-changing technological advancements as well as the growing customer demands. It’s getting more and more difficult for data center engineers and managers to ensure higher uptimes, handle costs, and deploy fast at the same time. But it’s not impossible either. How? Let’s find out!
Energy Efficiency and cost cutting : The data center industry is often caught in trouble because of its massive amount of energy consumption and rising temperature problem. Many a time, more energy is found to be wasted than used at a data center site. This happens when there is lack of proper energy monitoring tools and environmental sensors. For that reason having the back-up system that can operate in a safe environment with long life rate cycle can provide you a powerful and secure back up energy system.
How the march toward a decarbonized future will collide with economic factors to create a new and challenging reality for data center operators
In the past few years, more than 300 U.S. cities and dozens of public utilities have committed to aggressive climate initiatives aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions. And globally, countries have begun committing to banning the sale of new internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles by as early as 2025.
Across industries and international borders, the chorus of voices pushing for cleaner, more sustainable, and environmentally friendly business practices is reaching a crescendo. And few industries are singing quite as loudly as the technology sector is about its need to modernize and decarbonize their data centers. And it’s easy to see why.
Individual hyperscale data centers can consume as much as 2.25 million megawatt-hours per year, enough to power more than 200,000 homes. Smartphones and connected devices — some nine billion of them — stream more than eight billion hours of content every month, spiking server use and devouring power to the tune of 4% of the global electricity consumption and nearly 1.5 percent of global carbon emissions. This consumption presents an opportunity for vision, evolution, and change.
The industry is responding en masse in some creative ways, from purchasing renewable energy and carbon offsets or emissions credits, to setting science-based targets in emissions reduction to working with suppliers to reduce downstream environmental impact of the entire supply chain. The data center industry is heading toward a carbon-free (and even carbon negative) future, a goal that can only realistically be achieved in part through a renewed and refined focus on energy storage.
The Evolution of Data Center Backup Energy
For decades diesel-powered generators have served as a primary backup power source to the public grid. These backup systems are rarely used, meaning in raw volumes, their carbon emissions and environmental impacts may be minimal since they’re normally only expected to be run during public grid outages, which are infrequent. The technology is proven, reliable, scalable, and predictable. But as society continues decarbonizing, business and IT leaders are beginning to talk in earnest about transition plans from “traditional” backup energy sources to cleaner ones to eliminate both real and theoretical emissions.
Because renewable sources like solar and wind lack the national or global infrastructure to replace more conventional power sources effectively, there’s an opportunity for clean onsite generation to fill in energy capacity gaps and help maintain grid frequency or even provide other grid services as utilities continue to diversify their energy portfolios in pursuit of 100% renewable energy powered public grids.
While data centers, on the whole, are committed to achieving more sustainable operations, they’re also duty-bound to provide their customers — including banks, hospitals, and other essential services — with a high level of reliability which in turn requires predictable, reliable, and consistent power for their operations. This means the industry’s future likely involves striking a balance; seeking that consistency while minimizing environmental impact. It’s not easy, but it is possible.
The gradual transition to carbon-neutral or carbon-free data center operations will likely focus on three energy storage and production technologies that each has their own challenges but also present organizations with ample opportunity to create a path toward renewable energy that best suits them.
Batteries
Batteries are already a core component of modern data center power operations. Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) help ensure that servers and other essential hardware aren’t susceptible to power line disturbances or power quality issues. These batteries have improved in price and size as the data center industry has shifted to Lithium-Ion chemistries.
Large scale users, including Google, are testing expansion of their existing UPS systems now, paving the way for batteries to take on a more prominent role in data center backup. In addition to expanded back-ups, batteries used in grid-attached-storage continue to gain momentum as an instantaneous way to buttress capacity on grids or manage grid frequency. Data centers have an opportunity to combine both services in one package.
But buying bigger batteries and larger quantities of them can become prohibitively expensive. The cost of batteries tends to scale linearly, meaning that the initial investment will be significantly more than the cost of diesel generators for a similar run time and currently makes it difficult to justify for a business. As battery prices continue to drop, this could shift the economic argument in their favor.
More importantly, batteries also have practical challenges. In data centers, they’re designed to fill the gap between a grid outage and the spin-up time of diesel generators, pointing them towards very specialized uses. Even big batteries that address daily issues do not have the capacity required to power an entire data center or campus as the primary source of power in case of a sustained grid outage — a massive consideration for uptime-focused businesses like data centers facilities, especially those in regions with higher risks of business interruptions from natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes.
