Optimal Planning of Internet Data Centers Decarbonized by Hydrogen-Water-Based Energy Systems

The issue caused by increasing energy consumption of internet data centers (IDCs) has received critical attention. Hence, it is important to optimize the energy system of IDCs for energy saving and carbon emissions reduction. In order to explore the utilization of hydrogen in IDCs and the advantages of water cooling system, IDCs decarbonized by hydrogen-water-based energy systems are developed in this paper, which makes full use of both electricity and heating energy generated by fuel cells, and renewable energy. The integrated planning-and-scheduling problem is formulated as a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer programming problem to determine the optimal capacity of energy facilities and operation strategies. The developed IDCs are investigated with energy demand and solar radiation in typical days. It is found the developed IDCs are environmental friendly and cost-effective. The power usage efficiency can be as low as 1.02 and carbon emission reduction can be up to 59.1% when hydrogen price is U.S. department of energy target price 2/kg.