Data Centers Evolving towards Green and Low Carbon in ChinaMarch 2022

Since China announced the target to have carbon dioxide emission peak before 2030 and become carbon neutral before 2060, the topic has been of widespread concern for all industries. With the continuous development of China's digital economy, data traffic is exploding and as a result, the data centre market has maintained rapid growth. It is reported by China Academy of Information and Communications Technology that electricity consumption of data centres accounted for about 1% of the total electricity consumption in China by the end of 2020. 

Overall energy efficiency of data centres is still lagging behind the international level, and the utilization rate of renewable energy remains low. However, If the number of racks in data centres rises by 30% annually in future, the electricity consumption of data centres will exceed 3% of the total electricity consumption in China by the end of the Fourteenth Five-Year Plan, due for completion in 2025. Carbon emissions and energy consumption of data centres continue to increase rapidly, which has become an important challenge for “carbon emission peak and carbon neutrality”[NR1]  To improve the energy efficiency of data centres is not only an important means to reduce cost and raise the efficiency, but also a significant path to achieve carbon neutrality for the enterprises.

The number of racks in data centres in China 2016-2025

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.

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