White paper - Does DC power give better energy efficiency?
With the rising cost and consumption of electrical power and, at the same time, increasing pressure on corporate entities to become ‘green’, energy efficiency has become a widely debated topic. For many businesses the data centre has become their largest consumer of energy, with, for the first time, the cost of that energy now outstripping the cost of the IT hardware itself. So focus has been brought onto data centre energy efficiency as never before.
In North America, there has been increasing speculation over introducing DC power in the data centre in pursuit of increased operational efficiency. Work done by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory1 (LBNL), and followed up by august organisations such as The Uptime Institute2, has been widely quoted with claims for up to 28% efficiency gains by substituting DC power for the traditional AC power. It should be noted that, buried in the full document text, the improvement in efficiency compared to a ‘best-practice’ (North American) AC system is no more than 7%, but this goes largely ignored and unquoted.
However, the Berkeley Labs’ work, despite being heavily North American techno-centric has been called into question by many industry stakeholders on both sides of the Atlantic, so this paper will explore the historical drivers, the practical engineering considerations and the overall impact of any change particularly from a European perspective.
The conclusion will be drawn that the advantages are very much smaller than claimed and, in the holistic view of data centre efficiency, largely inconsequential.
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