Who would have thought old webpages were valuable? According to a Sunday morning news show they are not only valuable, but they’re being archived and useful for research. There’s a website called the Internet Archive, and its “Wayback Machine” has been making digital backups of the world wide web since 1996. This digital time machine allows users to see how websites looked in the past. The Internet Archive has over 900 billion webpages backed up representing over a 100 petabytes of data. A petabyte is equivalent to 20 million filing cabinets worth of paper storage.
If my inbox is any indication, big-data handling has become a trending issue for the power delivery industry. This hot topic is demanding attention with its ever increasing numbers of data centers coming online around the globe. Each of these facilities needs power and as they increase in size and numbers so does their power consumption. Worldwide there are roughly 11,000 data centers pulling power from the grid.
Exponential Load Growth
Let’s look at the power consumption numbers. The 2024 figures are still a work in progress, but they do show an upward trend. The 2023 statistics reveal that data centers accounted for roughly 4% of the global energy consumption. In tangible terms that represents about 7.4 gigawatts for 2023’s data center power consumption and it’s expected to double that amount by 2026. Goldman Sachs predicts that over the next decade the power consumed by data centers could be close to 47 gigawatts. This type of exponential growth is unprecedented. That brings us to another facet of the trending data center phenomenon.
Have you ever heard of hyperscale data centers? It’s the latest wrinkle on the big-data landscape. IBM says that hyperscale data centers “are massive data centers that provide extreme scalability and are engineered for large-scale workloads.” Professional data handlers are finding that bigger is better when it comes to managing the tsunami of big-data zettabytes flooding the world. These data handling specialists are evolving toward hyperscale data centers faster than expected and there’s no sign it’s going to slow down soon.
According to Synergy Research Group, hyperscale data centers hit the thousand mark worldwide in early 2024 with the US accounting for 51% of that global capacity. Synergy is forecasting that the total hyperscale data center capacity will double every four years and it’s safe to expect the demand for power will continue expanding. Applications like generative artificial intelligence are driving this capacity growth along with hyperscale computing, and cloud services are making gigawatt loads more commonplace for these facilities.
It's Manageable
Over the last several months “Charging Ahead” has been looking at a series of grid enhancing technologies. These applications are designed to increase the power grid’s capacity quickly while more traditional methods catch up with the demand. Technologies like dynamic line rating applications, advanced overhead conductor gear, power flow controllers, etc. have been the subject of the section, but what’s happening on the data center’s side of the equation?
Data center owners/operators are feeling the pressure to improve their overall efficiency and in the process reduce their energy demand. On-site renewable energy sources (i.e., wind solar, geothermal, etc.) plus storage are being developed as a strategy to offset power grid capacity issues. Turning them into microgrids has a lot of appeal for data center management. Along with reducing their energy bills, microgrids provides more resilience as the power grid struggles with climate change. It also helps them reduce their carbon footprint, which is good for the environment too.
Speaking of the environment, data centers produce a great deal of heat. That excessive heat has to be dissipated, but cooling can be a large energy expenditure. Several measures are being explored such as liquid cooling technologies, but excessive heat may not be a bad thing. Experts see excess heat as “the world’s largest untapped energy resource.” Tapping this source would improve the efficiency of data centers and this waste heat could be utilized for better purposes.
Asset management systems have been developed for large and small data centers. These DCIM (Data Center Infrastructure Management) systems are critical for running an efficient data center. They are holistic systems that continuously monitor, measure, and manage all the physical infrastructure of the data center to improve cooling and energy consumption. There are cutting-edge, technological applications that can lessen the impact of hyperscale data centers on the power grid and keep the electricity flowing!
