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Advanced concepts for renewable energy supply of data centres
Salom J., Urbaneck T., Oró E., River Publishers, Delft, the Netherlands, 2017. 238 pp. Type: Book (978-8-793519-42-8)
Date Reviewed: Dec 7 2018

Data centers are large critical infrastructure facilities devoted to the data processing, data storage, and communications needed by an ever-growing number and diversity of services; they must stay connected to the Internet backbone as well as to power grids. Consequently, they consume vast amounts of electrical power and must contain back-up, security, and environmental control systems for cooling. They are categorized in the European Standard EN 50600-1:2012. It has also become a competitive industry where economic sustainability depends on environmental sustainability and efficient operations.

This collective volume is one of the results of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), called RenewIT (http://www.renewit-project.eu/), and contains focused chapters with authors from the Catalonia Institute for Energy Research, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, and Chemnitz University of Technology.

Chapter 1 gives a general data center overview with traffic workload, power consumption, and fault-tolerance categorizations. Chapter 2 deals with temperature and humidity limits and power stability. Metrics for energy, environmental, water, and economic characteristics are proposed in chapter 3; theoretical models are given, as well as some case data. Chapter 4 looks at some approaches for data workload management linked to energy savings, taking largely a virtual machine approach or relying on modular uninterrupting power supplies (UPS). However, it fails to address finer aspects such as protocol customization, storage management, processor architecture selection, and application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), all of which were shown by COST Action IC0804 to yield significant gains (http://www.cost804.org/). On the seldom addressed issue of cooling, chapter 5 compares different air- and seawater-based solutions, while chapter 6 covers power and cooling for renewable power supplies to data centers, with vapor compression chillers, lead-acid batteries, district cooling and heat reuse, cooling towers, and biogas fuel cell reciprocating engines. The previous chapter’s findings are integrated into an extensive scenario-based simulation in chapter 7, taking different locations into consideration and identifying the key parameters for each solution. Appendix A provides details on photovoltaic, fuel cell, reciprocating engine, and wind-based power generation, as well as for a diversity of cooling production systems and energy storage facilities.

While the subject is complex and the interactions between subsystems plentiful, figures, tables, symbols, abbreviations, and nomenclature, as well as a joint index, very adequately complement the contributions.

The emphasis is on engineering aspects; however, thanks to real data/cases, the volume is not only relevant to the data center industry, but also to those advanced energy systems suppliers who integrate renewable power sources with data centers. It is also an excellent applications textbook for graduate students in renewable energy. It would have to be strengthened by a basic review of the more recent research findings in materials science and computer architectures, including the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart buildings, relevant to the subsystems described.

Reviewer:  Prof. L.-F. Pau, CBS Review #: CR146339 (1903-0074)
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