While data center construction and consumption continue to hit record highs, they are also coming under fire for consuming huge amounts of electricity and water, emitting greenhouse gases, and generating landfill DS215KLDCG1AZZ03A waste without producing tangible products – such as cars, homes, and steel. But in fact, our production and life, whether it is video streaming, online shopping, online social networking, immersive video conferencing, industrial processes and production control, etc., all leave the output of the data center. The digital world requires a considerable amount of processing and storage power, which is the driver of the exponential growth of data centers. How to improve the energy efficiency of data centers, reduce the impact on the environment, and the challenges brought by power supply have also become the current topic of concern.

As a global leader in infrastructure construction and digital services for data centers and key industry applications, Schneider Electric releases “The Visible Future – New Trends and Breakthroughs in the Data Center Market” at the beginning of each year based on deep industry DS215KLDCG1AZZ03A insights and practices to reveal what will happen in the data center industry in the New Year. What trends will affect the future direction of the data center industry (these trends are likely to take years to come) and what these changes and trends mean for data center operators? Below are the emerging trends predicted by the Schneider Electric Data Center Global Research Center for 2023.

Trend 1: Data centers will start to focus on the carbon footprint from the supply chain

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As more data centers shift to renewable energy, carbon emissions related to energy consumption (Scope 2) become a smaller percentage of the overall data center carbon footprint. At this point, carbon emissions from the construction and operation phase supply chain (Scope 3) will become the largest source of data center carbon emissions. However, the data center industry’s understanding and accounting for Scope 3 is very limited, mainly due to a lack of reliable vendor data, a lack of quantitative tools, and a lack of accounting methods. In the future, the quantitative evaluation of scope 3 will be one of the most important issues facing the data center industry. DS215KLDCG1AZZ03A Schneider Electric has previously published a white paper and tradeoff tool related to Scope 3, the Data Center Full Life Cycle Carbon Footprint Calculator, to help the data center industry “insight” into Scope 3 emissions by providing accounting methods and quantitative tools about Scope 3 to optimize decisions to achieve net zero carbon emissions earlier. Schneider Electric advocates that suppliers must provide data center operators with scope 3 emissions data related to the products used in the data center to further drive the industry-wide reduction process. Scope 3 Best practices for reducing emissions include extending server life cycles, sourcing efficient green and low-carbon products, and improving utilization across the board, from IT to physical infrastructure.

Trend 2: The evolution of data centers will accelerate the adoption of alternative backup technologies

As a backup power source for long delays (such as 24 hours), diesel generators have always been the first choice for data centers due to their high reliability. However, with the emergence of environmental problems, more and more people hope that they can be replaced with more sustainable DS215KLDCG1AZZ03A solutions. However, Schneider Electric research found that if the investment cost, fuel cost, carbon emissions, availability and other dimensions of a comprehensive balance, there is no ideal alternative. These alternatives also require further reductions in investment costs and fuel costs to make backup power economical. But at the same time, with the continuous improvement of grid power supply stability and IT system resilience, the requirement for backup power delay is significantly reduced (for example, most grid outages are less than 2 hours). In addition, the adoption of distributed energy sources such as wind storage provides more opportunities to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions through dynamic responses between data centers and the grid. The traditional distribution architecture that relies on firewood and UPS to provide high-quality power for critical loads is evolving into energy storage systems. Schneider Electric’s latest research finds that the evolution of these three data centers will make lithium battery energy storage or hydrogen fuel cell technology more competitive, thereby promoting its adoption by the industry as an alternative to firewood. In the future, the data center energy landscape will be more diversified, and backup power solutions, grid services, and distribution architectures will have greater imagination and development space.