Towards a net-zero data center

A world consisting of billions of service-oriented client devices and thousands of data centers can deliver a diverse range of services, from social networking to management of our natural resources. However, these services must scale in order to meet the fundamental needs of society. To enable such scaling, the total cost of ownership of the data centers that host the services and comprise the vast majority of service delivery costs will need to be reduced. As energy drives the total cost of ownership of data centers, there is a need for a new paradigm in design and management of data centers that minimizes energy used across their lifetimes, from “cradle to cradle”. This tutorial article presents a blueprint for a “net-zero data center”: one that offsets any electricity used from the grid via adequate on-site power generation that gets fed back to the grid at a later time. We discuss how such a data center addresses the total cost of ownership, illustrating that contrary to the oft-held view of sustainability as “paying more to be green”, sustainable data centers—built on a framework that focuses on integrating supply and demand management from end-to-end—can concurrently lead to lowest cost and lowest environmental impact.