Currently, there is a significant lack of transparency of environmental cost, which should be urgently resolved given the vast scale of resource usage. Therefore, NGIatlantic.eu invites EU – US applicants that can provide and experiment with transparency mechanisms on the environmental cost of the Internet. Identification and tagging of most resource consuming elements are also very important and urgent. On both sides of the Atlantic, there has already been some early research and innovation projects and initiatives focussing on alternatives to improving energy efficiency to ensure the greening and sustainability of the Internet and of the economy relying on it. This topic welcomes the results from these EU activities to team up with US teams (or vice versa, with US teams twinning with EU teams) to carry out experiments in this vitally important NGI topic.

That will allow the utility to match in real-time specific units of renewable energy generation with Microsoft’s usage – and dispatch energy from storage if there’s a shortfall – to ensure Microsoft is continually supplied with renewable energy, Janous said.

Typically, a data center is seen as an inflexible load, or a “single block” of power, she said. In other words, if the facility’s total load is 10MW, the conventional approach is to ensure there’s 10MW of backup power. Google has learned to not treat total load as an inflexible block and match backup capacity more tightly with the capacity required by applications that run in the facility and the duration for which it’s required.

Also this year, Microsoft announced a successful test for powering a data center rack with a hydrogen-fueled automotive fuel cell, looking at the technology as one of the potential replacements for diesel generators.

Google estimates that the total generation capacity of all diesel-fueled data center backup generators deployed worldwide is more than 20 gigawatts, which could spell vast opportunities for renewable energy storage.

Maud Texier, Google’s carbon free energy lead

But proponents of immersion cooling technologies emphasize their efficiency advantages. These solutions don’t require any fans. Server fans are usually removed altogether. “You can probably get at least a 15-percent energy reduction in a lot of environments by going to liquid cooling,” Brown said.

As Uptime’s Lawrence pointed out, generators are “a problem.” They are expensive to deploy and maintain, they pollute the atmosphere, and make a lot of noise. So far, however, they’ve been an indispensable part of any data center that’s meant to keep running around the clock.

Perhaps the most critical feature of a decentralized UPS architecture is it allows data centers to meet increased demand by deploying equipment-specific resources that can scale according to needs. New cabinets can expand capacity as necessary, while additional rectifiers and battery modules can increase power for servers added to open racks. By relying on DC power components that connect directly to the AC utility feed, a decentralized power architecture allows facilities to operationalize stranded white space and maximize infrastructure without placing any additional strain on their existing UPS system.

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