Abstract
The main objective of this investigation is to assess the use of hybrid renewable configurations in the cooling unit of data centers. The importance of free cooling technology and compare its potential with renewable energy systems are investigated. As cloud-based and online services grow, the numbers of data centers are expected to increase drastically. Data centers consume a tremendous amount of energy which leads to irreparable environmental impacts. To handle this issue, data centers need following an energy-saving procedure which is either generating green energy or decreasing the electricity demand. The two major approaches to decrease the cooling energy consumption of data centers are utilizing free cooling systems and having onsite renewable energy systems. In this paper, the effectiveness of both approaches in various configurations is evaluated in terms of energy and water-saving, net present cost, and emission rates, through comparative analyses. Furthermore, to discover the maximum cooling energy-saving potential of this data center, the combination of both approaches has been investigated for the case study of Tehran. The techno-economic-environmental analysis is applied to each energy scenario. The simulations indicate that free cooling systems can reduce up to 47% of cooling energy with 38% of Net Present Cost (NPC). Whereas, local renewable energy systems decrease 37% of cooling energy with the almost same cost as a conventional data center over 20 years. It was also found that the ideal scenario can save cooling energy by the maximum number of 86% and NPC by 30% and can reduce the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) from 1.38 to 1.21. This study highlights the importance of natural cooling systems and denotes that these systems might save more energy and water with less cost rather than a local renewable energy system. Also, the proposed hybrid renewable energy configuration can be used in other data centers for polygeneartion and trigeneration purposes.
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