Organizations plan, implement and coordinate sustainable data center energy strategies to gain the benefits of reduced energy costs in new and existing facilities. These strategies involve investments in renewable technology for cooling and power delivery.
Can sustainable data center energy reduce carbon emissions? It can and it will if you learn how to do it right. Data center energy efficiency is becoming a vital practice in IT departments everywhere.
In order to reduce carbon emissions and protect the environment, we need to promote sustainable development in this area. In this article, We will introduce some ways to promote sustainable development in data centers.
How Sustainable Data Center Energy Can Reduce Carbon Emissions?
The data center industry is under increasing pressure to reduce its carbon footprint. As the world’s population grows and becomes more connected, the demand for data center space will increase.
Data centers currently consume 2% of global electricity and this number is expected to jump by 40% by 2025. To meet growing demands and reduce environmental impact, data centers must embrace sustainable energy practices.
Here are some ways in which sustainable data center energy can reduce carbon emissions:
1. Use Clean Energy Sources
A large data center can be a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions, even if it has no direct impact on the environment.
Data centers use a lot of power, and the majority of that power comes from nonrenewable resources like coal and natural gas. The more efficient a data center is, the less energy it uses — and the less carbon dioxide it emits.
2. Minimize Wasteful Energy Usage
Minimize wasteful energy usage in your data center by monitoring it closely and making changes as needed. This includes everything from server hardware to software configurations and power management settings.
For example, you can shut down or bring offline servers that you don’t need, since they will continue consuming power even though they aren’t being used. Measure your energy consumption with an accurate tools at regular intervals to compare it against historical data and to track progress over time as improvements are made.
3. Improve Energy Efficiency
The energy-efficiency of the data center is increasingly a key consideration for organizations. Virtualization can play a key role in helping organizations reduce energy consumption and costs.
Virtualization allows you to consolidate workloads on fewer physical servers, which reduces power consumption and cooling requirements. With virtualization, you can also dynamically adjust processor and memory utilization based on application demand, which allows you to better manage power usage.
4. Upgrade equipment when possible
In order to reduce energy consumption in the long run, upgrade equipment when possible so that it uses less power overall and doesn’t have to work as hard when it performs its tasks (which also reduces wear on parts).
For instance, replace older servers with newer models that use less power — especially if those older models are still working well enough.
Data Center’s Carbon Footprint
The data center’s carbon footprint is a function of three things:
- How much energy the data center uses, which we’ll call PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness).
- How much electricity is used to transport the power to the building? We’ll call this the Power Conversion Effectiveness (PCE).
- How much electricity is lost in transmission from the power plant to your data center? Transmission & distribution losses, which we’ll call T&D losses, are responsible for about 5% of electricity loss.
In order to reduce your data center’s carbon footprint, you need to focus on improving these factors.
The average PUE for the data centers is 1.7, meaning that for every watt of IT load, an additional 1.7 watts of electricity is consumed by the facility’s power distribution, cooling and infrastructure systems. This number varies widely from company to company, but best practice is to keep PUE below 2.0.
Reducing PUE requires an understanding of how energy is consumed by a data center facility, including its power distribution system, cooling equipment and energy management systems. The first step in reducing PUE is measuring it: Data centers should use software tools like the free Open Source Energy
Monitoring Toolkit (OSEMTK) or commercial products like Microsoft’s Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM). These tools can help identify areas where operational changes or upgrades to existing equipment can achieve energy savings.
Once you have a clear picture of where your facility’s energy consumption stems from, you can begin implementing measures to reduce it.
Green Data Center Acknowledge and Certification
The Green Grid, a coalition of more than 100 companies and organizations, created the Green Data Center Acknowledgement (GDC-A) to recognize those companies that have earned a GDC-A.
The GDC-A is based on the following six criteria:
- Energy efficiency
- Water efficiency
- Waste reduction
- Procurement responsibility
- Environmental stewardship
- Information transparency
A green data center certification is a way to ensure that the facility meets specific energy efficiency standards.
There are currently four major green data center certifications:
- Green Grid (GG)
- Eco-Innovation Initiative (EII)
- USGBC LEED for Data Centers (LEED-DC)
- Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System™ (STARS®)
Data Center Design that reaches LEED Gold status can reduce carbon emissions by up to 71 percent. Green or sustainable data centers are becoming more popular and important as data centers around the world continue to use a large percentage of the world’s electricity.
The Uptime Institute’s recent Energy Standards Benchmark report indicates that the green data center energy efficiency program can reduce carbon emissions up to 90 percent.
Conclusion
As businesses transform themselves to meet the demands of digital transformation, they are looking for ways to reduce costs and become more efficient. One way that many companies are doing so is by investing in green data centers.
This is why global IT leaders are prioritizing green data center, and so does the investor in data center industry.
The focus of this sustainable data center energy green project was the design, implementation and operation of the facility to minimize its impact on the environment.
So, would you agree that there is ample room for improvement?.
Zero carbon emissions is the ultimate goal. But it’s also worth noting just how great of a step we’ve already taken in this area, and how much our data centers have done to reduce carbon emissions. Sustainability is still a hot topic, and the green data center will remain so for years to come.