Land in the agricultural age, energy in the industrial age, and data in the digital age are all key factors of production that drive social progress and development. As a “modern factory” for data storage and processing, the data center supports the digital economy to become the main engine driving economic growth, and is also the physical base carrying the application of digital technology, and its industrial enabling value is gradually becoming prominent.

Focusing on the land of China, the “East number and West calculation” project was officially launched and implemented, which is conducive to the large-scale, intensive and green development of China’s computing power, of which the required hub node computing power cluster PUE (power use efficiency) should reach 1.25 or less, and the current average PUE value in the industry is about 1.49. This shows that the data center as a large energy consumption potential for energy conservation and emission reduction is huge, how to effectively reduce the total energy consumption and carbon emissions under the premise of ensuring the reliability of key loads, the use of green new energy as much as possible, to ensure the sustainable development of data centers, is the biggest challenge of the current data center construction and transformation. The ABB White Paper on Carbon Neutrality in Data Centers (hereinafter referred to as the White Paper) explores the long-term path of low-carbon data center development from the carbon footprint analysis of data centers, and provides references for the planning, construction and transformation of data centers under the goal of “dual carbon”.

Data centers accelerate the introduction of new energy sources

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The “dual carbon” road map is emerging

Research by industry institutions shows that the demand for electricity in data centers is rising sharply with the continuous expansion of the number and scale of construction. From the perspective of the whole life cycle of data centers, the indirect carbon emission of energy based on the use of electricity energy ranks first in its carbon footprint. Therefore, under the basic premise of ensuring stable and reliable power supply to meet the continuous and uninterrupted operation of data centers, changing the energy supply structure is an important measure to promote the low-carbon development of data centers. It is necessary to access and utilize clean energy. Explore the multi-energy supply fusion mode based on multi-energy complementarity to meet the long-term sustainable development of data centers.
New energy generation generally has centralized deployment and distributed deployment. Centralized deployment mainly transmits clean energy from large new energy power stations to the power side through the power grid of the power grid company to achieve power decarbonization. The power generation point of new energy is usually located far away from the data center, and the deployment of data centers near suitable new energy power station sites usually lacks two important resources: customers and the network. However, cross-regional power transmission will face the problem of large loss and high operation and maintenance cost. The White Paper pointed out that through the rational layout of data centers and the nearby consumption of clean energy according to local conditions, it not only solves the new energy consumption, but also provides abundant green energy for the data centers of large energy consumers.

The national project of “counting East and counting West” launched this year has been well planned and laid out for this purpose. In addition, distributed new energy is deployed near the data center and connected to the nearby distributed new energy to realize the integrated management of source, load and storage in the park where the data center is located, providing some additional green energy as a supplement for the data center and reducing the carbon emission value generated during the operation of the data center. ABB, as a leader in power and automation, uses digital technology to reduce the carbon emission value of the data center. A safe and reliable solution can be provided for this.