Green electricity supports the sustainable development of computing power
From daily online shopping, taxi-hailing to artificial intelligence, the importance of computing power in production and life has become more and more prominent. In particular, as multimedia generative artificial intelligence such as text and images has entered the era of large-scale application, the acceleration of computing power development has brought huge demand for electricity, and "the end of artificial intelligence is energy" has become a concern of the industry and society.
Computing power is the key support for the development of the digital economy, and the scale of China's computing industry has grown at an average annual rate of nearly 30% in recent years, ranking second in the world in 2023. The continuous improvement of computing power is closely related to the accelerated layout of large-scale data centers in recent years. The national "14th Five-Year Plan" outline clearly proposes to build a number of national hub nodes and big data center clusters, and relevant departments have successively issued documents such as the "Implementation Plan for Computing Hubs of the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System", and the construction of 8 national computing hub nodes and 10 national data center clusters has been accelerated, driving the development of computing power to "accelerate".
As the physical carrier of computing power, data centers receive, process, store, and forward data by installing servers, which requires a large amount of power to support operation. Globally, according to statistics, the global data center power consumption will be 460 billion kWh in 2022 and will exceed 1,000 billion kWh by 2026. As far as China is concerned, the electricity consumption of data centers has also grown rapidly in recent years, and it is expected that by 2025, the proportion of electricity consumption in the whole society will increase to 5%, and the power consumption of data centers will rise rapidly.
In the face of the rapid growth of power consumption brought about by the development of computing power, it has become an important and key measure to support the development of computing power with large and rapidly growing green power.
On the one hand, China has built the world's largest power supply system and clean power generation system, of which hydropower, wind power, photovoltaic, biomass power generation and nuclear power under construction have ranked first in the world for many years. The annual new power generation capacity of wind power and photovoltaic power alone exceeds 200 billion kilowatt hours, which can meet the electricity demand for the development of computing power.
On the other hand, the rapid development of the computing power industry has also brought pressure on the growth of carbon emissions. Promoting the active use of green electricity in data centers and building green computing power is an inevitable measure to effectively cope with the pressure of environmental protection and carbon emission reduction, enhance the international competitiveness of the computing power industry, and help achieve the "double carbon" goal.
In addition, about 60% of China's new green electricity is in the western region. Guiding data centers to gather in resource-rich areas in the west can not only alleviate the pressure of construction and operation and maintenance in the eastern region, optimize the layout and structure of China's data centers, but also promote the consumption of wind, solar and green power in the western region, and drive regional economic and social development.
Of course, there are also some challenges in supporting the development of computing power with green electricity, including the coordination and connection between computing power and power development, and the technical mode of green power supply to data centers. Wind power and photovoltaic power generation have the characteristics of intermittency, randomness and volatility, while data centers have high requirements for real-time and stable power supply, and need to innovate supply technologies and institutional mechanisms. In addition, there are also constraints such as the low enthusiasm for green power consumption in data centers, and the difficulty of coordinating computing power and power dispatching operation.
In order to better promote the integrated development of green power and computing power, it is necessary to strengthen the connection between computing power and power development planning, dynamically study and judge the scale, type and electricity demand of computing power development, further improve the relevant planning of energy and power development in the region where the national hub node is located, and make preparations for the planning and construction of power infrastructure such as power supply, transmission and transformation in advance. Actively explore and carry out innovation in the green power supply mode of data center source-grid-load-storage integration, and encourage the exploration of new business forms and new models of distributed power generation and offshore wind power to supply power to data centers. Strengthen the research and development of new energy storage technologies with large capacity, long-term and high safety, study the energy storage equipment suitable for data centers, and improve the reliability of green power supply in data centers. Encourage data centers to take advantage of their own large and stable electricity demand to participate in market-oriented transactions of new energy, and encourage the procurement of green computing power. Strengthen scientific and technological research, reduce energy loss in all aspects of the data center, promote the utilization of waste heat, and tap the potential of flexible power consumption in the data center.
