A sustainable development pattern integrating data centers and pasture-based agrivoltaic systems for ecologically fragile areas

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2022.106684Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The sustainable development pattern incorporates pasture-based photovoltaic power stations and data centers for ecologically fragile areas.

  • A method integrating financial, technical and environmental factors is applied to find feasible conditions and suitable regions for sustainable development pattern.

  • The data centers can get environment benefits from coal-fired energy replacement, energy saving for cooling and grassland carbon sink.

  • The development pattern can address land use conflict and control desertification.

Abstract

Advances in information technology facilitate the construction of data centers (DCs), bringing huge social and economic benefits. However, the rapid development of DCs poses a heavy burden on the environment. To promote economic growth while mitigating environmental impacts, this paper proposes a sustainable development pattern that incorporates DCs and pasture-based photovoltaic (PPV) power stations in cities with rich solar energy but fragile ecological environments. An integrated method framework is applied to show the feasibility and potential of the DC-PPV model. A power generation model based on the DC electricity demand and local climate is established to calculate the installation capacity and pasture area of PPV stations, and a cost-benefit analysis is conducted to find the feasible conditions of the DC-PPV model from financial, technical and environmental perspectives. Then, the environmental potential of the DC-PPV is reflected by the GHG emission reduction from three paths, and the socioeconomic contribution is assessed using input-output (IO) analysis. The results show that the model can facilitate the local economy and effectively reduce carbon emissions. Under the planning DC scale in the study area, the model reduces GHG emissions by more than 3 million tons per year. Moreover, it converts more than 1140 hectares of Gobi land to grassland, which increases the carbon stock by 150,262 tCO2e and saves 39 million yuan of desert management.

Introduction

Advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) and the increasing use of internet services have led to a rapidly increasing demand for data centers (DCs) (Tripathi et al., 2017). However, the massive expansion of DCs has led to huge amounts of power consumption and carbon emissions, thereby causing great pressure on the energy supply and environment (Kubler et al., 2019; Liu et al., 2020; Yuan et al., 2021). Economically and environmentally compatible pathways for ICT development are needed to mitigate these pressures, especially under the urgency of reaching global net zero CO2 emission levels. Therefore, two pathways are proposed to address energy supply and environmental issues: one is to reduce DC power consumption by improving cooling performance (Cho et al., 2017; Meng et al., 2020; Zhou et al., 2018) or constructing DCs in areas with lower ambient temperatures (Sheme et al., 2018), and the other is to penetrate renewable energy into power supply systems (Aste et al., 2018; Grange et al., 2018). However, few studies combine the two pathways and discuss the compatible conditions of establishing DCs powered by renewable energy in cold areas. Moreover, researchers mainly focus on the DCs powered by distributed renewable energy systems such as distributed photovoltaic (PV), ignoring their problems: the construction and operation of renewable energy systems will pose cost pressure for DC owners, and large-scale onsite distributed PV stations will occupy more industrial land and cause land-use conflicts (Hernandez et al., 2015).

In this context, suitable locations and energy supply modes for DCs are essential to reduce GHG emissions and operation costs. In fact, constructing green DCs in ecologically fragile areas with abundant renewable energy resources, cold ambient temperatures and large amounts of unused land may be an effective solution (MIIT, 2021a). In addition, the data industry can also promote economic and social development in these areas, thus yielding a win‒win situation. However, few studies have discussed the feasibility of this approach. In this paper, we build a general and integrated development pattern that includes large-scale PV power suppliers and DC industries for ecologically fragile areas to facilitate their local economy and mitigate the environmental burden. To further resolve the land-use conflicts, the pasture-based PV on the Gobi land is integrated into the model. As shown in Fig. 1, the shadow of PV panels and the cleaning water are able to improve the land quality (Adeh et al., 2018) and allow pasture to grow, the electricity generated by the pasture-based PV can partially satisfy the electricity demand of DCs, and the power gap is compensated by other energies.

The DC-PPV model links the supply and demand of electricity, which reduces the energy burden of DCs and improves the PV power utilization rate in solar energy-rich areas. Furthermore, the introduction of pasture-based agrivoltaics on Gobi land can expand the ecological value and mitigate land use conflict, which provides suggestions for simultaneously promoting economic development and ecological restoration in ecologically fragile areas. To popularize the DC-PPV model more easily, this paper quantifies its feasible conditions in climate, technical, environmental and economic aspects and calculates its potential environmental and socioeconomic benefits.

Section snippets

Development pattern of agrivoltaics and data centers

The number of DCs powered by renewable energy is gradually increasing, and their technical feasibility has been widely examined. The impact of solar energy intermittency and workload fluctuations in DCs have been estimated (Golari et al., 2017; Kwon, 2020), and Lagana et al. (2018) proved that despite the fluctuation of renewable energy, it can be applied in geographical data centers with the help of a smart load allocation strategy. Khalaj et al. (2018) p proposed a framework that realized the

Study framework

The aim of this paper is to propose a DC-PPV sustainable development pattern and a calculation framework for resource-rich but ecologically fragile areas. A multimethod integrated evaluation framework was established, as shown in Fig. 2. The DC-PPV model involves pasture growing on unused lands, large-scale PV stations and DCs; thus, step 1 is to construct a technical model that can connect the parameters of three industries. Since PPV and DCs are both capital intensive, the cost-benefit

Results and discussion

This paper proposed a widely valid development pattern for areas with rich irradiation but fragile ecosystems. To test the validity of the DC-PPV model, a representative case at Hainan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (Hainan), Qinghai Province, China, was applied. Qinghai is a pilot area listed in NDRC (2021a) to construct large-scale DCs in areas with cold climates and abundant solar resources. In 2017, some large-scale DCs were built in Hainan, and several attempts at the pasture-based PV

Conclusion

The DC industry, with its high energy consumption and GHG emissions, has caused an increasing impact on energy supply and carbon neutrality. Constructing DCs in regions with abundant solar energy and cold ambient temperatures has become an effective solution. However, previous studies focus more on the technical aspect of the DCs powered by clean energy, ignoring their potential environmental and economic benefits to the local areas, as well as the conflicts in cost and land use when

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jiaming Zhang: Methodology, Validation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization. Tao Wang: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Yuan Chang: Conceptualization, Validation, Writing – review & editing. Bingsheng Liu: Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No.71871235, No.72074034), Bayu Scholar Program (No.YS2020001), Chongqing Talents Program (No. CQYC202105082) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China (No. 2022CDJSKPY17, No. 2021CDSKXYGG013). The authors are grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

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