From windmills to nuclear power plants

or why green energy is becoming increasingly important in this day and age.

are resources that, unlike organic fuels (such as oil, gas, coal and uranium ore), are inexhaustible and do not cause serious environmental damage. Among them are water, wind, sunlight, etc. Our forefathers built wind and water mills well before the advent of the steam engine; however, all those designs were low-capacity, and as time went by their energy output proved insufficient.

Once people learned to produce and burn fossil fuels, the use of wind-driven and other green machines was dramatically curtailed. And the latter half of the last century saw a surge of interest in them.

Green energy has been on the world’s agenda for several decades now, which is only natural: the greenhouse effect, air pollution and rising disease incidence are obviously no boon for mankind. According to 2021 figures, some 50 bln tonnes of greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere annually, 70% of which is due to energy derived from fossil fuels. Scientists all over the world have been looking for alternatives to coal, oil and gas for many years now, all the more so because the mineral resources on our planet will all be gone in a hundred years or so. But the sun will not go out, the wind will not drop, and the ocean will not dry out. The only question is how to learn to take the best advantage of these resources using state-of-the-art solutions.

There are a great many sources of renewable energy, including tidal energy, convective available potential and cryogenic energy, but the following five are considered to be primary: apart from solar, wind and hydro energy, they include geothermal heat (geothermal energy) and biomass. Each of these sources has its advantages and limitations.

Renewable energy utilization is on the rise throughout world. Since 2012, more than 50% of all generating capacities being installed annually has been based on renewable sources. Over 20 years, investment in green energy products has grown virtually tenfold (from $33 bln to over $300 bln) and counting. According to forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA), green energy resources will increase to 2,400 GW by 2027 (this is approximately the total electricity generating capacity of China), and their share will reach 38% globally! The main setters of this trend are European countries, China, America and Canada. In China, for example, 76% of the total power capacity installed was green as early as 2021. In the USA, renewable energy is 21% of the total power generation, whereas NPSs account for 20%.

Russia cannot yet claim major achievements in this field: the share of renewable energy sources in the unified energy system of Russia does not exceed 1.5%. Availability of a large supply of useful resources, a lack of regulatory incentives and adequate investments are not conducive to environmental awareness.

The renewable energy growth rates are highly impressive, but it would be premature to talk about complete replacement of exhaustible sources with inexhaustible ones. In the foreseeable future, the latter will simply lack capacity to meet mankind’s electricity needs, which will be rising 3% annually in 2023–2025 (IEA forecast). Besides, as recent experience shows, excessive dependence on environmentally friendly energy can cause a collapse: in 2021, the overcast and calm weather in Europe brought to a standstill the operation of wind generators and solar batteries, which caused a number of blackouts and a dramatic hike in gas prices.

Another major bar to a fast growth of environmentally friendly energy is its price. The achievement of carbon neutrality, planned by a number of countries for as early as 2050, will cost approximately $275 trln according to McKinsey’s forecast.

Environmental concerns and the use of green technology are a headache not only for governments but also for businesses, and specifically data centres, which consume some 3% of the planet’s electric power, and in terms of negative environmental impact are on a par with air travel.

The above notwithstanding, due to the digitization of economies and the rising numbers of internet users, demand for the services of data centres keeps increasing. In this country alone, the DC market grew 28.1% to 89.1 bln rbl. last year, and plans for 2023–2024 provide for the addition of 32 thou. new rack units (according to the figures from iKS-Consulting).

The new normal incentivizes DC providers to look for innovative solutions to improve their own energy efficiency and achieve net zero.

One of such solutions is to use renewable energy sources. The trail is blazed here by IT giants such as Google, Microsoft and Apple, as well as a number of other major internationals. Here are but a few examples of data centres with the globally most popular energy efficiency certificate The Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design (LEED):

• Facebook’s data centre is situated 60 km from the Polar Circle on the bank of a river and uses an in-house hydroelectric power plant.
• Apple’s data centre in North Carolina (USA) generates 244 mln kWh of power per year using an in-house wind farm.
• Apple’s data centre in the town of Maiden (USA) set up for in-house needs two solar farms, each capable of generating 42 mln kWh of electric power per year.
• Verne Global’s data centre in Reykjavik is built next to geysers and fed by geothermal power stations.
• The Swiss data centre Swiss Fort Knox uses glacier water from an underground lake in its cooling systems.

DC energy efficiency can also be improved by upgrading the cooling systems, which account for about 40% of all power used by data centres. The most advanced solution here is thought to be the free-cooling process, which uses ambient air for data hall cooling.

The only option here that minimizes the environmental impact and provides renewable energy is nuclear power. And this trail has already been blazed. E.g., the Microsoft corporation intends to move in the near future from using electricity to using portable nuclear reactors to power its DCs, but as the first step to diversify its sources of electric power by going green, i.e. buying nuclear power on the market. In Russia, the use of nuclear power in DCs is pioneered by Rosatom. Many experts believe that siting data centres next to sources of nuclear power is the most promising strategy for the industry. Also, connecting data centres to various phases of NPS or GEPS [hydro-electric power station] provides full-scale category one power supply, which will make it possible to forgo using DGU (diesel generators) as standby power supplies.

DC operators factor into the design a multitude of variables, including the cost of energy, energy efficiency and environmental footprint. Special emphasis is also placed on redundancy schemes, which make it possible to minimize the risk of downtime and data loss, as well as provide standby power sources, cooling systems and networking equipment.

The optimal configuration for every location across the world is custom-designed – it can include various energy sources, such as solar panels, wind generators, and small-scale modular reactors. However, even the most reliable source will be unable to prevent service outages if the redundancy scheme does not provide for hot failover (such as diesel generators and UPS).

The redundancy scheme is more critical to uninterrupted operation and minimization of possible downtime than a mix and types of the energy sources used.