Energy Efficiency in Data Centres and the Barriers to Further Improvements: An Interdisciplinary Investigation

Creation, storage and sharing of data throughout the world is rapidly increasing alongside rising demands for access to the internet, communications and digital services, leading to increasing levels of energy consumption in data centres. Steps have already been taken towards lower energy consumption, however there is still some way to go. To gain a better understanding of what barriers there are to further energy saving, a cross-section of industry representatives were interviewed. Generally, it was found that efforts are being made to reduce energy consumption, albeit to varying degrees. Those interviewed face various problems when attempting to improve their energy consumption including financial difficulties, lack of communication, tenant/landlord type relationships and physical restrictions. The findings show that the data centre industry would benefit from better access to information such as which technologies or management methods to invest in and how other facilities have reduced energy, along with a greater knowledge of the problem of energy consumption. Metrics commonly used in the industry are not necessarily helping facilities to reach higher levels of energy efficiency, and are not suited to their purpose. A case study was conducted to critically assess the Power Utilisation Effectiveness (PUE) metric, the most commonly used metric, through using open source information. The work highlights the fact that whilst the metric is valuable to the industry in terms of creating awareness and competition between companies regarding energy use, it does not give a complete representation of energy efficiency. Crucially the metric also does not consider the energy use of the server, which forms the functional component of the data centre. By taking a closer look at the fans within a server and by focussing on this hidden parameter within the PUE measurement, experimental work in this thesis has also considered one technological way in which a data centre may save energy. Barriers such as those found in the interviews may however restrict such potential energy saving interventions. Overall, this thesis has provided evidence of barriers that may be preventing further energy savings in data centres and provided recommendations for improvement. The industry would benefit from a change in the way that metrics are employed to assess energy efficiency, and new tools to encourage better choices of which technologies and methodologies to employ. The PUE metric is useful to assess supporting infrastructure energy use during design and operation. However when assessing overall impacts of IT energy use, businesses need more indicators such as life cycle carbon emissions to be integrated into the overall energy assessment

The Social Dimensions of a Technological Innovation: Agrivoltaics in the U.S.

This thesis lays the groundwork for the broader realization of agrivoltaics by identifying the socio-political opportunities and barriers to development. Combining theoretical frameworks on technology diffusion and social acceptance of renewable energy with expert perspectives, this work seeks to understand, address, and accommodate the role of society and policy in combining solar energy and food systems. Three empirical studies are presented that first investigate the impediments to farmer adoption of the technology, then explore the challenges to development from the perspective of solar industry professionals, and conclude by outlining a comprehensive legal framework for agrivoltaics in the U.S. The findings identify the key socio-political opportunities for agrivoltaics include: the retention of agricultural land and rural interests, and increased local level acceptance of solar development. The key barriers include: ensuring long term agricultural productivity is not compromised, and subnational localized zoning strategies. This thesis can inform agrivoltaic decision making, solar development practices, land use management, and policy making in a way that supports the furtherance of the renewable energy transition, conserves arable land, and utilizes innovative solar photovoltaic technologies

Evaluating demand response opportunities for data centers

Data center demand response is a solution to a problem that is just recently emerging: Today's energy system is undergoing major transformations due to the increasing shares of intermittent renewable power sources as solar and wind. As the power grid physically requires balancing power feed-in and power draw at all times, traditionally, power generation plants with short ramp-up times were activated to avoid grid imbalances. Additionally, through demand response schemes power consumers can be incentivized to manipulate their planned power profile in order to activate hidden sources of flexibility. The data center industry has been identified as a suitable candidate for demand response as it is continuously growing and relies on highly automated processes. Technically, data centers can provide flexibility by, amongst others, temporally or geographically shifting their workload or shutting down servers. There is a large body of work that analyses the potential of data center demand response. Most of these, however, deal with very specific data center set-ups in very specific power flexibility markets, so that the external validity is limited. The presented thesis exceeds the related work creating a framework for modeling data center demand response on a high level of abstraction that allows subsuming a great variety of specific models in the area: Based on a generic architecture of demand response enabled data centers this is formalized through a micro-economics inspired optimization framework by generating technical power flex functions and an associated cost and market skeleton. As part of a two-step-evaluation an architectural framework for simulating demand response is created. Subsequently, a simulation instance of this high-level architecture is developed for a specific HPC data center in Germany implementing two power management strategies, namely temporally shifting workload and manipulating CPU frequency. The flexibility extracted is then monetized on the secondary reserve market and on the EPEX day ahead market in Germany. As a result, in 2014 this data center might have achieved the largest benefit gain by changing from static electricity pricing to dynamic EPEX prices without changing their power profile. Through demand response they might have created an additional gross benefit of 4 of the power bill on the secondary reserve market. In a sensitivity analysis, however, it could be shown that these results are largely dependent on specific parameters as service level agreements and job heterogeneity. The results show that even though concrete simulations help at understanding demand response with individual data centers, the modeling framework is needed to understand their relevance from a system-wide viewpoint

Energy-aware service provisioning in P2P-assisted cloud ecosystems

Cotutela Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya i Instituto Tecnico de LisboaEnergy has been emerged as a first-class computing resource in modern systems. The trend has primarily led to the strong focus on reducing the energy consumption of data centers, coupled with the growing awareness of the adverse impact on the environment due to data centers. This has led to a strong focus on energy management for server class systems. In this work, we intend to address the energy-aware service provisioning in P2P-assisted cloud ecosystems, leveraging economics-inspired mechanisms. Toward this goal, we addressed a number of challenges. To frame an energy aware service provisioning mechanism in the P2P-assisted cloud, first, we need to compare the energy consumption of each individual service in P2P-cloud and data centers. However, in the procedure of decreasing the energy consumption of cloud services, we may be trapped with the performance violation. Therefore, we need to formulate a performance aware energy analysis metric, conceptualized across the service provisioning stack. We leverage this metric to derive energy analysis framework. Then, we sketch a framework to analyze the energy effectiveness in P2P-cloud and data center platforms to choose the right service platform, according to the performance and energy characteristics. This framework maps energy from the hardware oblivious, top level to the particular hardware setting in the bottom layer of the stack. Afterwards, we introduce an economics-inspired mechanism to increase the energy effectiveness in the P2P-assisted cloud platform as well as moving toward a greener ICT for ICT for a greener ecosystem.La energía se ha convertido en un recurso de computación de primera clase en los sistemas modernos. La tendencia ha dado lugar principalmente a un fuerte enfoque hacia la reducción del consumo de energía de los centros de datos, así como una creciente conciencia sobre los efectos ambientales negativos, producidos por los centros de datos. Esto ha llevado a un fuerte enfoque en la gestión de energía de los sistemas de tipo servidor. En este trabajo, se pretende hacer frente a la provisión de servicios de bajo consumo energético en los ecosistemas de la nube asistida por P2P, haciendo uso de mecanismos basados en economía. Con este objetivo, hemos abordado una serie de desafíos. Para instrumentar un mecanismo de servicio de aprovisionamiento de energía consciente en la nube asistida por P2P, en primer lugar, tenemos que comparar el consumo energético de cada servicio en la nube P2P y en los centros de datos. Sin embargo, en el procedimiento de disminuir el consumo de energía de los servicios en la nube, podemos quedar atrapados en el incumplimiento del rendimiento. Por lo tanto, tenemos que formular una métrica, sobre el rendimiento energético, a través de la pila de servicio de aprovisionamiento. Nos aprovechamos de esta métrica para derivar un marco de análisis de energía. Luego, se esboza un marco para analizar la eficacia energética en la nube asistida por P2P y en la plataforma de centros de datos para elegir la plataforma de servicios adecuada, de acuerdo con las características de rendimiento y energía. Este marco mapea la energía desde el alto nivel independiente del hardware a la configuración de hardware particular en la capa inferior de la pila. Posteriormente, se introduce un mecanismo basado en economía para aumentar la eficacia energética en la plataforma en la nube asistida por P2P, así como avanzar hacia unas TIC más verdes, para las TIC en un ecosistema más verde.Postprint (published version

Market Myopia’s Climate Bubble

A growing number of financial institutions, ranging from BlackRock to the Bank of England, have warned that markets may not be accurately incorporating climate change-related risks into asset prices. This Article seeks to explain how this mispricing occurs, drawing from scholarship on corporate governance and the mechanisms of market (in)efficiency. Market actors: (1) Lack the fine-grained asset-level data they need in order to assess risk exposure; (2) Continue to rely on outdated means of assessing risk; (3) Have misaligned incentives resulting in climate-specific agency costs; (4) Have myopic biases exacerbated by climate change misinformation; and (5) Are impeded by captured regulators distorting the market. Further, trends in institutional share ownership reinforce apathy toward assessment of firm-specific fundamentals, especially over longterm horizons. This underpricing of corporate climate risk contributes to the negative effects of climate change itself, as the mispricing of risk in the present leads to a misallocation of investment capital, hindering adaptation and subsidizing future combustion of fossil fuels. These risks could accumulate to the macroeconomic scale, generating a systemic risk to the financial system. While a broad array of government interventions are necessary to mitigate climate-related financial risks, this Article focuses on proposals for corporate governance and securities regulation—and their limits. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently drafting a rule on mandatory climate risk disclosure. This Article argues that the SEC should seek out climate expertise through interagency collaboration and staff hiring, work with auditors and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and provide guidance on climate risk analytics. This Article argues that climate risk disclosure is necessary, though alone not sufficient, to address the widespread disregard of corporate climate exposure

LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 277, GIScience 2023, Complete Volum