Estimating a data centre's electrical carbon footprint
May 2012Analytical Instrumentation & Environmental Monitoring
White paper by Dennis Bouley, Schneider Electric
Carbon and energy issues appear in international headlines with increased frequency.
Governments, non-profit organisations, and corporations now conduct studies to analyse their carbon footprint on a regular basis, the goal being to measure the impact of their activities on global warming and to establish action plans that reduce carbon emissions.
According to a US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report, US data centres consumed 61 billion kilowatt-hours of power in 2006. That is 1,5% of all power consumed in the United States and represents a cost of $4,5 billion. Data centres have been identified as one of the fastest growing consumers of energy, thus the EPA is mandating that government agencies develop strategies for energy efficiency in government operated data centres and the private sector may soon be asked the same.
The 15 countries that were EU members before 2004 have committed to the principles of the Kyoto Protocol. They have agreed to cut their combined emissions of greenhouse gases to 8% below the 1990 level by 2012. In addition, The European Commission (EC) Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency, which is a set of voluntary efficiency measures, has been established to set minimum standards that will serve as a basis for more stringent regulation in the future. The ultimate goal is to improve average data centre efficiency by 30%.
In 2007, data centres in Western Europe consumed a whopping 56 terawatt-hours of power per year. According to the EU, this figure is likely to almost double to 104 by 2020. This projected growth, if not offset by innovations in efficient energy management, will prevent the European Union from achieving its overall carbon reduction and climate change targets.
How ‘green’ is a given data centre? To answer that question, data centre professionals must first determine their energy usage and then convert that usage into carbon emissions. To determine whether a data centre’s carbon footprint is being reduced; the first step is to measure consumption. Three key variables have a major impact on data centre power consumption: data centre location, IT load, and electrical efficiency. The impact of changes to these variables can be modelled using a series of web-based APC TradeOff Tools. The focus of this paper is the energy consumption of data centres, the use of the APC tools and how it all translates into estimating a carbon footprint.
About the author: Dennis Bouley is a senior research analyst at Schneider Electric’s Data Center Science Center. He has published multiple articles in global journals focused on data centre IT and physical infra-structure environments and has authored several white papers for The Green Grid.
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