Sustainability: Data Centers double share of renewables

The European project DC4Cities has allowed to significantly increase the percentage of power obtained from renewables in data centers energy consumption and limit their environmental impact, tools increasingly crucial in making our cities smarter and greener.

DCs doubling the percentage of power obtained from renewables compared to a 25% average. It’s the main outcome of the european project DC4Cities, (An environmentally sustainable Data Centre for Smart Cities) funded with a contribution of 3.5 million euro envisaged by the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union which has created a consortium comprising 10 EU research centers, including ENEA.

DCs’sustainability has been improved also thanks to specific solutions allowing the use of different energy sources, through the interaction among data centers located in different geographical areas.   This thanks to systems able to retrieve updated information on renewable energy availability based on weather forecasts and local-scale energy production and to make predictions on energy demand.

“In order to reach this goal- Andrea Quintiliani, ENEA researcher, pointed out- we have organized workloads to match energy surplus periods, without any logistics modification or quality downgrading.

Thanks to the very positive results obtained in the trials, the technical solutions designed will be soon distributed and applied in real-world data centers,  contributing to the reduction of energy consumption and their environmental impact, crucial tools in the management of smart cities.”

The solutions developed by the project DC4Cities have been tested in three DCs in Italy and Spain. While the Trento trials showed the capacity of DC4Cities to combine energy demand with energy availability, in Barcelona the different availability of renewables between day and night was optimized. Lastly, at the HP Headquarters in Milan, a dual power source configuration was used (photovoltaics and grid).

The DC4Cities consists of two subsystems : the Northbound System,  capable of providing updated information on energy availability based on data on weather forecasts and local -scale energy production and the SouthBound Control System, which gathers information on the software inside the DCs in order to be able to predict its energy behaviour.

For more information log on to:

Link to the project: http://www.dc4cities.eu/en/

Contact person: Andrea Quintiliani, ENEA Casaccia Research Center, andrea.quintiliani@enea.it