Journal of Fundamentals of Renewable Energy and Applications
Open Access

Abstract

Dynamic Energy Modelling for Data Centres: Experimental and Numerical Analysis

Eduard Oró, Alvaro Vergara and Jaume Salom

The total energy demand of data centres has experienced an important increase in the last years. Due to their unique nature, data centres demand enormous amounts of energy. Therefore, they are ideal candidates for implementing actions to reduce the energy consumption and thus improve their ecological footprint while at the same time reduce their operational costs. The aim of this work is to develop and to validate with experimental data a dynamic energy model of a real data centre located in Barcelona. The dynamic energy model is then used first to characterize the energy consumption and the energy efficiency of the infrastructure and second to see the benefits of the implementation of different energy efficiency strategies into the data centre cooling system portfolio. The results show an average Power Effective Usage (PUE) of 1,74 while some of the proposed strategies can achieve important energy reductions, up to 21%, in the cooling energy consumption. Therefore, the combination of them can achieve important reductions in the overall data centre energy consumption. The validated energy model can then be used to study the benefit of the implementation of different energy efficiency strategies in other data centres.