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The massive data centre energy consumption has motivated significant efforts to use energy efficiency strategies and the implementation of renewable energy sources that reduce their operational costs and environmental impact. Considering that the potential of many of these measures is often closely linked to the climate conditions, the location of data centres can have a major impact on their energy demand. Moreover, from a holistic approach, differences among regions become even more important when accounting for the electricity attributes from the grid. To assess these differences this work compares by the use of energy indicators the behaviour of a data centre located at different representative emplacements in Europe. To do so, a dynamic energy model which incorporates free cooling strategy and photovoltaic energy is developed. The paper concludes by suggesting that future data centre developments could consider site selection as a new strategy to limit the environmental impact attributable to this sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The continuous growth in size, complexity and energy density of data centres due to the increasing demand for storage, networking and computation has become a worldwide energetic problem. The emergent awareness of the negative impact that the uncontrolled energy consumption has on natural environment, the predicted limitation of fossil fuels production in the upcoming decades and the growing associated costs have strongly influenced the energy systems engineering work in the last decades. Therefore, the implementation of well known and advanced energy efficiency measures to reduce data centres energy demand play an important role not only to a supportable growth but also to reduce its operational costs. The carbon footprint is greatly influenced by the energy sources used. Therefore, there have been recent efforts to exploit and reuse or combine green energy sources in data centres to lower brown energy consumption and CO 2 emissions. This paper presents a comprehensible overview of the current data centre infrastructure and summarizes a number of currently available energy efficiency strategies and renewable energy integration into data centres and its characterization using numerical models. Moreover it would be necessary to develop dynamic models and metrics for properly understand and quantify the energy consumption and the benefits of applying the incoming energy efficiency strategies and renewable energy sources in the data centres. Thus, the researches or investors will be able to compare with reliability the different data centre designs and choose the best option depending on the renewable energy sources and capital available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]