The European Commission has awarded a €2.9m grant to a consortium of manufacturers, users, and academics to develop new technologies to build smarter, more energy-efficient data centers.
About 2.5% of all European energy is sucked up by servers in data centers. This is expected to grow to 5% by 2019.
The GreenDataNet project is led by power management company Eaton, working together with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Nissan, ICTroom, Credit Suisse, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and the University of Trento (UNITN).
The GreenDataNet project will develop state-of-the-art technologies that will allow urban data centers to reach 80% of renewable power use and decrease their average Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from an average of 1.6-2.0 today to less than 1.3.
To further reduce the need for grid power, GreenDataNet will also work on the integration of local photovoltaic energy in combination with an innovative, large-scale storage solution that will facilitate the integration of data centers into smart grids. Within this project, second-life Li-ion electric car batteries will be investigated as a more advantageous solution for data centers to become actual smart grid nodes.
Using lots of partially degraded electric car batteries as a store could be one way that power could be stockpiled as it was generated and then supplied to data centers at peak times.
Batteries for electric cars have a shelf life of about 14 years before the constant charging and re-charging makes them unsuitable for use in such vehicles.
The whole solution will be implemented on an open-source platform to allow third parties to provide additional optimization modules and ensure the long-term sustainability of the project.
Three demonstration sites will be utilized to test and validate the GreenDataNet concept: a data center operated by Credit Suisse in Switzerland, a data center at CEA in France that includes a large photovoltaic area and a smart grid test platform and a pilot site in the Netherlands that is being used by a Dutch consortium working on Green IT technologies.
