How can green computing power deeply explore "green"?

In the era of digital economy, computing power has become the core productivity of the information society, and the demand for computing power is growing. However, the huge demand for computing power has also brought a large amount of energy consumption and carbon emissions. In the context of the "double carbon" goal, Green computing power is regarded as an inevitable choice and important goal for the high-quality development of computing power.

Green and low-carbon transformation of data centers has become the general trend

Computing power, like electricity in the industrial age, has become a new key productivity.

According to statistics, in 2023, the scale of my country's core computing power industry will reach 2 trillion yuan, and computing power is accelerating its penetration into various industries and fields such as government affairs, industry, transportation, and medical care.

The latest data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology shows that my country's hierarchical optimization computing power supply system has been initially established, ranking second in the world in terms of computing power scale.

"For every 1 yuan invested in computing power, it will drive economic output of 3-4 yuan." Yu Xiaohui, president of the China Academy of Information and Technology, previously stated that computing power has a significant driving effect on the improvement of the digital economy and GDP.

At the same time, in the process of promoting rapid economic development, the total energy consumption of data centers is also rising, becoming a "major energy consumer" in economic development.

As a "smoke-free steel mill", data centers contain a large amount of IT equipment, power supply equipment and refrigeration equipment, which require huge amounts of electricity. Among the construction and operation costs of domestic data centers, electricity consumption exceeds 60%.

Data from the National Energy Administration shows that in 2022, the power consumption of national data centers will reach 270 billion kilowatt hours, accounting for about 3% of the total society's electricity consumption. In 2021, the power consumption of national data centers will be 216.6 billion kilowatt-hours, which is twice the cumulative power generation capacity of the Three Gorges Power Station of 103.649 billion kilowatt-hours during the same period. As the digitalization process of the Internet accelerates, it is expected that by 2025, the proportion of national data center power consumption in the total society will increase to 5%, and by 2030, the national data center power consumption will be close to 400 billion kilowatt hours.

In this context, the accelerated transformation of data center construction to green and low-carbon has become a general trend, among which green computing power is the driving force.

Green computing power refers to green and low-carbon throughout the entire process of computing power production, supply, and services, and involves energy conservation and emission reduction at multiple levels such as underlying facilities, computing power resources, management platforms, and application services.

The reporter noted that the national policy level has long paid attention to the high-quality development of computing power, and has successively issued a series of policy documents to guide data centers to follow the path of green development.

The "14th Five-Year Plan for Digital Economy Development" clarifies that in accordance with the principles of green, low-carbon, intensive and efficient, we will continue to promote the construction of green digital centers, accelerate the energy-saving transformation of data centers, and continue to improve the utilization level of renewable energy in data centers.

The "Action Plan for the High-Quality Development of Computing Infrastructure" issued by the State Council and other six departments clearly proposes to develop research on green and low-carbon technologies, carry out evaluations of green and low-carbon computing power parks, and publish annual reports on green and low-carbon development of computing power facilities.

The "Three-Year Action Plan for the Development of New Data Centers (2021-2023)" proposes to encourage enterprises to explore and build supporting systems such as distributed photovoltaic power generation and gas distributed energy supply, guide the construction of new data centers on the new energy power generation side, and consume new energy locally. Energy, promote new data centers to efficiently utilize clean energy and renewable energy, optimize energy use structures, and help the information and communication industry achieve the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutrality.

In fact, in the context of the "dual carbon" strategy, controlling the energy consumption of data centers is not only related to the computing power industry, but also an important part of the national carbon emission goal.

Computing power to "travel westward" and consume green energy in the west

Such a huge power demand has given the driving force to "move westward" computing power.

In May 2021, the National Development and Reform Commission and other four departments jointly released the "Implementation Plan for the Computing Power Hub of the National Integrated Big Data Center Collaborative Innovation System", marking the official launch of the "Eastern Computing and Western Computing" project. This is another major strategic resource allocation project in my country after the South-to-North Water Diversion, the West-to-East Power Transmission, and the West-to-East Gas Transmission.

According to the plan, eight places including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu, and Ningxia were selected to start the construction of national computing power hub nodes, and 10 national data center clusters were planned.

One of the major contents of implementing "counting in the east and counting in the west" is to deploy large data centers in areas rich in renewable energy to optimize network, energy and other resource guarantees.

The abundant land resources and green energy in the western region are a strong guarantee for "counting the east and counting the west". The main person in charge of the High-Technology Department of the National Development and Reform Commission publicly stated that my country's data centers have a certain degree of imbalance between supply and demand and disorderly development. On the one hand, the eastern region has a large application demand, but energy consumption indicators are tight and power costs are high, making large-scale development of data centers difficult and limited; on the other hand, the western region is rich in renewable energy and has a suitable climate, but it has small network bandwidth and bottlenecks such as high cross-provincial data transmission costs make it impossible to effectively meet the demand in the east. Through the layout of national hub nodes, data centers can be guided to gather in resource-rich areas in the west and surrounding areas of first-tier cities at appropriate distances, achieving orderly development of data centers.

"Compared with the eastern region, the western region is rich in renewable energy. By adapting local conditions to local conditions, the intensive, green and efficient development of data centers in the western region will help achieve my country's 'double carbon' goal." He Baohong, director of the Institute of Cloud Computing and Big Data at the China Academy of Information and Communications, also expressed this.

In December 2023, the National Development and Reform Commission and other five departments jointly issued the "Implementation Opinions on In-depth Implementation of the" Eastern Computing and Western Computing "Project to Accelerate the Construction of a National Integrated Computing Power Network." According to recent plans, by the end of 2025, the national hub node The proportion of green electricity in newly built data centers will exceed 80%, which will draw a clear line for data center energy supply and electricity.

246 national green data centers have been built

As the path to greening data centers becomes clearer, many projects have begun to be implemented, and positive progress has been made in various tasks.

On June 6, six departments including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the "2023 National Green Data Center List". Among them are 50 data centers in the fields of communications, Internet, public institutions, energy, finance, and smart computing centers. At present, my country has built a total of 246 national green data centers.

At the operational level, building a scientific and standardized green computing power evaluation indicator system is the key starting point for promoting the development of green computing power. Also in June this year, China Academy of Information and Communications and other institutions jointly released the "White Paper on Data Center Full Life Cycle Green Computing Power Index", which innovatively built a data center full life cycle green computing power index system and gave a full life cycle research scope and measurement method of green computing power.

At the local practice level, Inner Mongolia is one of the eight national computing power hubs and has the national data center cluster, the Helingel Data Center Cluster. In recent years, Inner Mongolia has introduced the computing power demand in the east into the local area in an orderly manner, and the proportion of green electricity used in data centers currently in operation exceeds 80%.

According to the "Qinghai Province Green Computing Power Base Construction Plan", Qinghai will build a "1+2+N" overall layout, accelerate the construction of the Xining-Haidong smart computing and supercomputing core clusters, support the transformation of data centers from storage to computing, reasonably increase the proportion of smart computing and supercomputing, and enhance service support capabilities around the green computing power industry chain. Zhou Wu, deputy director of the Energy Bureau of Qinghai Province, said that as of now, Qinghai has launched the country's first clean energy power supply sensing platform, built the country's first fully clean energy power traceability green data center, and issued a total of more than 6.5 million new energy green certificates, providing authoritative proof of green power consumption for the development of green computing power.

There are also many places that are focusing on accelerating the transformation and upgrading of data centers and introducing renewable energy. Zhejiang plans to promote the energy-saving renovation of data centers across the province. The rectification plan covers a total of 147 data centers across the province.

Ningxia relies on its advantages in green electricity. It is expected that by 2025, the average PUE value of Ningxia Zhongwei Green Data Center Cluster will not be higher than 1.2, and the renewable energy utilization rate will reach 65%.

Overall, although the strategy of "counting in the east and counting in the west" is steadily advancing, it still faces many problems. Han Xue, deputy director of the Research Office of the Institute of Resources and Environmental Policy of the Development Research Center of the State Council, said that the construction of data centers in the western region is still facing obstacles such as insufficient technical personnel and poor operation and maintenance levels. Data centers in the central and eastern regions are likely to face a lack of local green electricity. These all need to continue to be resolved and improved in the process of advancement.