The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology re-emphasized the significance of green data centre construction in the“New Data Center Development Three-year Action Plan (2021-2023)”in July 2021. Reducing the basic energy consumption and improving energy efficiency has already become a target for data centres in China. To help to achieve the goal of “carbon emission peak and carbon neutrality”a number of Chinese bodies, such as The National Development and Reform Commission, National Energy Administration, Office of the Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology have jointly issued an implementation plan to promote green and high-quality development of new infrastructure for things like data centres and 5G in November 2021. This implementation plan requires forming a green and comprehensive integration operation pattern by 2025, with a significant improvement of electricity and renewable energy utilization efficiency of data centres. By then, the average PUE of newly built large and hyperscale data centres will have dropped below 1.3 (as opposed the current 1.6-1.7 level), and the green and low-carbon grade will have reached 4A or above.
The plan calls for the use of green energy by encouraging the use of more renewable energy such as wind and solar power and supporting the large-scale application of modular hydrogen cells and solar panel parks in small or edge data centres. Technically, the application range of new technologies of green and low-carbon will gradually be expanded. In terms of IT devices, cloud computing and other technologies will pool and virtualize data centre resources to improve server utilization with the same power consumption. Using AI technology to optimize operation control is becoming an important way to reduce the energy consumption of data centres.
To date, the data centres of leading operators in China including Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent, Jingdong, OPPP, ByteDance, China telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, GDS, Chindata Group, Yovole Networks, Centrin Data, Dr. Peng Group, VNET Group , @HUB, Hotwon and etc. have participated in the “data center green grade assessment” and “data centre Low-carbon grade assessment". All the operators are trying to contribute to the green, low-carbon and high-quality development of China's data centre industry and build a solid new infrastructure foundation for the digital transformation programme.