China Energy Storage Network News: In recent years, the digital economy has developed vigorously, which has promoted the continuous growth of the scale and number of data center construction units. As a “big energy consumer”, the current electricity consumption of data centers has accounted for about 3% of the world’s total, and is growing rapidly at a rate of more than 10% per year.

low-carbon outlets

Under the “double carbon” goal, optimizing and improving the energy efficiency of data centers is becoming a top priority, and the development of the industry is also ushering in a green and low-carbon outlet. A large number of industrial opportunities not only appear in the research and development and application of advanced green technology products, the construction and transformation of old and new data centers, but also Covering many aspects such as new energy power generation, energy storage, intelligent operation and maintenance.

Energy saving and emission reduction is the direction of development

PUE is the ratio of the total energy consumption of the data center to the energy consumption of IT equipment. The closer the value is to 1, the higher the energy efficiency. From the perspective of the energy consumption composition of the data center industry, it mainly includes IT equipment energy consumption, cooling system energy consumption, power supply and distribution system energy consumption, lighting and other energy consumption, among which IT equipment energy consumption accounts for the largest proportion, followed by refrigeration system energy consumption . Therefore, advanced infrastructure such as high-efficiency IT equipment and high-efficiency cooling systems is one of the keys to reducing heat dissipation consumption and improving energy efficiency in data centers.

Recently, Huawei released the smart micro-module 6.0 and small lithium battery UPS solutions. According to the test by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the annual average PUE of Huawei’s smart micro-modules in Beijing is as low as 1.111, which can save 30% of power consumption compared with traditional solutions. A small 100-kilowatt data center can save 190,000 yuan in electricity bills a year. According to Yang Yougui, President of Global Marketing and Sales Services of Huawei Digital Energy, the small lithium battery UPS power supply solution is specially designed to meet the power supply needs of various low-power scenarios such as small and medium-sized data centers, bank outlets, subways, and retail. Save about 65% of cabinet space.

Huawei’s innovation is just the epitome of continuous innovation and breakthroughs in advanced data center infrastructure. Tencent’s low-PUE data center design adopts Tencent Cloud’s latest generation of T-block technology as a whole, and uses high-voltage direct current, precise airflow control, AI tuning and other technologies to control the annual average PUE at a very low level.

The reporter learned from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is promoting the acceleration of the application of advanced green technology products, encouraging the application of high-efficiency IT equipment such as high-density integration, liquid cooling and other high-efficiency refrigeration systems, and supporting the exploration of using lithium batteries as diversified energy storage and backup power devices for data centers. . Xie Cun, director of the Department of Information and Communication Development of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said in an interview with the media that it is necessary to further accelerate research and development breakthroughs in high-end chips, new data centers, supercomputing and other fields, strengthen the technical layout of advanced computing, computing and network integration, and promote the computing power industry. Efficient and green development.

Efficient use of clean energy

It is also important to promote the transformation of the way energy is used. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has made it clear that enterprises are encouraged to explore the construction of supporting systems such as distributed photovoltaic power generation and gas distributed energy supply, guide the construction of new data centers to the side of new energy power generation, promote the efficient use of clean energy and renewable energy in new data centers, and optimize the energy consumption structure.

A large-scale data center interconnection platform in Guangdong, in addition to leading advantages in technology and scale, also has an industry-leading ultra-low PUE value of 1.15, and is also at the forefront of the world in terms of green and low-carbon data centers. One of the reasons for its “high score” is to power the data center through distributed photovoltaics.

Photovoltaic technology company LONGi Green Energy provided distributed photovoltaics for the project. According to Chen Pengfei, president of LONGi Green Energy’s China Government and Enterprise Regional Department, the average annual power generation of a single roof photovoltaic power station in the data center is more than 1.5 million kWh. The annual power generation capacity of the eight factory buildings is more than 12 million kWh, and the total power generation capacity within the design service life is at least 300 million kWh.

The “National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System Computing Power Hub Implementation Plan” clearly states that it will promote data centers to make full use of renewable energy such as wind energy, solar energy, tidal energy, and biomass energy; support data center clusters to support renewable energy power stations; expand The scope of renewable energy market-oriented transactions, encouraging data center enterprises to participate in renewable energy market transactions; supporting data centers to use large-scale user direct supply, pulling dedicated lines, and building distributed photovoltaics to increase renewable energy power consumption; ensuring data center land and water use resource.

Take the largest green zero-carbon data center in Central China that Huawei helped China Three Gorges Corporation build as an example. It uses Three Gorges’ green hydropower, high-efficiency temperature control, and high-efficiency power supply equipment to achieve high energy efficiency and sustainable development of the data center.

“In terms of electricity, large-scale use of green power such as photovoltaics, wind power, and hydropower, and the deployment of distributed photovoltaics can reduce data center carbon emissions by 1% to 2%; in terms of water resources, minimize the use of clean water, and use new cooling technologies to reduce water cooling. Reduce the consumption of water resources by cooling; intensive use of land resources, maximize the value of land, so that each square meter of land can generate more computing power. In addition, use natural cold sources to a greater extent through technical means to reduce climate dependence.” Yang Yougui Say.

Deep integration of artificial intelligence

Looking forward to the key points of data center construction in the next stage, relevant experts believe that whether the data center can be deeply integrated with artificial intelligence will not only play a decisive role in the energy saving and emission reduction of the data center, but also have key significance for the evolution of the data center itself.

“The next-generation data center has four characteristics: low-carbon symbiosis, integration and simplicity, autonomous driving, and safety and reliability. The era of intelligent and sustainable next-generation data centers is coming, and technological innovation will be the key to leading the development and transformation of data centers Power.” Yang Yougui said.

The long-term operation of the data center needs to realize remote inspection, expert consultation, cloud platform cloud training, etc. are inseparable from artificial intelligence technology. In the future, artificial intelligence voice recognition, image recognition and automatic sensing technology will become the key to realizing intelligent operation and maintenance of data centers. key to the solution.

In the eyes of industry insiders, once a security problem occurs in the infrastructure, the loss will be huge. The blessing of artificial intelligence technology is the key to ensuring information security. For example, a fire broke out in the data center of a cloud service provider in Europe in 2021, and millions of websites were affected. Some data is permanently lost. Therefore, it is necessary to promote the security of the architecture from the device to the main data center, build a comprehensive security defense line, and ensure component availability and system reliability to the greatest extent.

Fully unleashing the potential of artificial intelligence technology can also liberate people from tedious work. Yang Yougui said that from Huawei’s practice, artificial intelligence can help data centers realize automatic driving. Through automatic operation and maintenance, 2,000 cabinets can be inspected in 5 minutes; Optimal cooling strategy, from refrigeration to “smart” cooling; through operation autonomy, to maximize the value of mining resources.