A Holistic Approach to Energy Management
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Total Energy Management for Professional Data Centers

Tempro Energy ManagementThe TEMPRO project – “Total Energy Management for professional data centers” developed solutions to significantly reduce the energy consumption of data centers. The focus was on a holistic approach to energy management. Instead of looking only at energy consumption during operation, as was usually the case in the past, the TEMPRO team took a look at the entire life cycle of all devices and systems in the data center – from raw material extraction to production and transport to recycling.

Data centers need more and more energy

The background to this is the steadily increasing energy requirements of data centers. In 2020, the more than 50,000 data centers in Germany will require 16 billion kWh of electricity – as much as five medium-sized coal-fired power plants produce per year. The digitization of society and the economy is likely to mean that more and more computing capacity and therefore more and more energy will be needed in data centers in the future.

With new technologies such as autonomous driving, Industry 4.0 and the expansion of 5G mobile networks, increasing numbers of smaller edge data centers are also being built. “The energy-efficient construction and operation of edge data centers is a challenge,” states Borderstep project manager Dr. Ralph Hintemann.

By 2030, edge data centers may be responsible for one-third of the energy demand of all data centers in Germany.

TEMPRO – Total Energy Management for Professional Data Centers – not only developed the scientific basis for a holistic view of energy management. TEMPRO also provided concrete assistance, starting points and options for action to reduce the environmental impact of data centers. Among other things, software tools were developed to support energy- and resource-conscious data center operation. With the initial assessment tool ERBET, which is now publicly available, data center operators can, for example, estimate and evaluate their holistic energy requirements.

Tools to support the resource-conscious data center

With the sub-project TecPo – “Technologies and Potentials” – Borderstep contributed to the creation of a scientific assessment basis for a holistic view of the energy demand of data centers. With the help of a new type of technology radar for data centers, more than 60 efficiency technologies were identified and evaluated. The resulting savings potentials for the holistic energy efficiency of data centers were estimated.

Borderstep also actively supported the corporate partners who developed new efficiency technologies in the project. For this purpose, the institute determined customer requirements for the new solutions and estimated their market potentials

TEMPRO – Total Energy Management for Professional Data Centers – was a collaborative network project initiated by Borderstep together with seven other project partners and three associated partners. The project was funded within the context of the 6th Federal Government Energy Research Program.

Tool

TEMPRO’s initial assessment tool enables a data center to be classified in terms of efficiency on a minimal data basis. Depending on the completeness of the input, the results are specified and classified in terms of efficiency.