The “greenest” data centers in the world: a small overview

Data centers for large technology companies are now needed, like air. Of course, data centers, with their servers, cooling and lighting systems, consume a lot of energy. Of course, the situation has improved compared to data centers that worked 10-15 years ago, but not so much that one could talk about the complete victory of energy-saving technologies.

But there are data centers where the situation with energy saving is much better than in the middle hand of DC. There are not many such data centers, but they are, and in this short review we suggest evaluating some of the most interesting “green” data centers.

Finnish Google Data Center (Hamina, Finland)

This data center, like some other "green" DCs, benefits from its location.

The thing is that in this region the temperature of the coastal waters (and the DC is located just next to the sea coast) is only a few degrees above zero. And this situation is observed all year round.

In addition, the DC itself is located in the premises of the former paper mill, which already has a ready-made chilled water intake system. Of course, I had to adapt the system to the needs of the data center, but it already was. There is also an integrated cleaning system, and the return system is designed in such a way that practically no harm is done to the environment.



Due to all these factors, such an indicator as PUE (Power usage effectiveness) in this particular data center is only 1.1. In the usual data center, the PUE is 1.6-1.8.

Equinix AM3 Data Center

This data center, located in the “science park” of Amsterdam, is one of the greenest in the world. This was confirmed, in particular, by the DatacenterDynamics Green Data Center Award in 2012. This data center uses both terrestrial technologies and technologies that now serve for the benefit of astronauts.

For example, fuel cells are used. It also uses a “green” cooling system with all modern modifications.

For personal needs, this data center generates about 800 thousand kilowatt-hours per year.


Here you can rewind for about a minute, at the beginning there is just an advertisement.

Microsoft Standalone DC (Wyoming, USA)

Microsoft is also not far behind other companies, offering a new technology - the introduction of fuel cells (methane) directly into the server racks.

The data center building is located next to the water treatment plant. What for? And in order to use the methane emitted at the station, without the need to transport this gas from somewhere. Actually, we are talking more about biogas - a mixture of several gases released during biochemical processes in organics, where methane predominates.

The "methane" data center gets these advantages compared to traditional DCs:

1. Reducing the likelihood of equipment failure due to power outages. Since in this case the data center is its own energy company, no loads / failures of the region’s general energy system will lead to a failure of autonomous equipment;
2. reduction of infrastructure costs. This was already mentioned above - since there are no uninterruptible power supply units, transformers, and other power equipment, the cost of creating an energy infrastructure for a data center is significantly reduced;
3. increasing energy efficiency of equipment. This is not just about PUE. The overall energy efficiency of the system, according to the authors of the project, is doubled;
4. The data center can be built almost anywhere where there is methane, away from the extensive energy infrastructure of the city / region. In addition to methane, you can use "solar" energy, wind energy and other alternative energy sources.

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Google Data Center (Zhanghua, Taiwan)

About 600 million US dollars are planned to be invested in the new Dobra Corporation data center. This data center uses wind energy, and its own wind farm was built for it, which supplies the data center.



In addition, an unusual cooling system is used here. So, the water used here as a cooler is cooled at night (sorry for the tautology), after which it is collected in insulated storage, using in the daytime as necessary.

With the onset of the day, cold water is used in the cooling system, and the water accumulated at night is just enough for the light (and therefore warm) time of day. Thus, the data center from Taiwan uses much less electricity than in a conventional DC,

NSA Data Center (Maryland, USA)

We already wrote about this in DC, what is interesting here is that for cooling the infrastructure, wastewater (treated) is used here.

It is planned to use about 19 million liters of treated wastewater per day at this facility to cool the data center equipment. An agreement has already been signed (if it hadn’t been signed yet, this is the NSA) with the Howard County authorities, which provides for the use of wastewater to cool the NSA data center. Without this agreement, the treated effluent would be discharged into the nearest river immediately after treatment.

It is worth noting that only 40 million US dollars are required to create a new pumping station that will take water to cool the agency's data center. The data center itself, which is being built in Fort Meade, will be launched only in 2016. But the full cost of this data center is 860 million US dollars.

Facebook Arctic Data Center in Lulea

We also wrote about this data center , DC from Facebook is one of the most (if not the most) green data centers in the world, with a PUE of 1.07. This is even better than Google’s data center in Finland, where PUE = 1.1.

By the way, it would be interesting to hear from the habaso-community - perhaps you know other "green" DCs that use various kinds of energy-efficient technologies? It would be interesting to read about them, we propose to arrange a discussion in the comments.