Modelling of Electricity Mix in Temporal Differentiated Life-Cycle-Assessment to Minimize Carbon Footprint of a Cloud Computing Service

DOI

10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.35How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Life cycle assessment, data centre, carbon footprint, dynamic power mix.

Abstract

The information and communications technologies (ICT) sector is seeking to reduce the electricity consumption of data processing centres. Among the initiatives to improve energy efficiency is the shift to cloud computing technology. Thanks to very favourable geographical conditions, the Canadian energy mix is highly suited to the implementation of data centres, especially in light of the significant potential of renewable energy, which can help to curb greenhouse gas emissions. In the green sustainable Telco cloud (GSTC) project, an efficient cloud computing network would be set up to optimize renewable energy use based on several data centres. This study aimed to develop a temporally differentiated life cycle assessment (LCA) model, adapted to short-term predictions, to provide a regionalized inventory to model electricity generation. Purpose of this model is (i) to calculate more accurately the carbon emissions of ICT systems and (ii) to minimize the daily carbon emissions of the GSTC servers. This paper focuses mainly on the electricity generation modelling during the use phase in the context of the life cycle assessment methodology. Considering the time scale of the model, the difference between the annual fixed average and a shorter period may be highly relevant, in particular when assessing the green house gases (GHG) emissions of a process such as an ICT system, which mainly operates during peak load hours. The time dependent grid mix modelling makes it possible to manage the server load migrations between data centres on an hourly basis.

Copyright

© 2014, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Elsa Maurice
AU  - Thomas Dandres
AU  - Reza Farrahi Moghaddam
AU  - Kim Nguyen
AU  - Yves Lemieux
AU  - Mohamed Cherriet
AU  - Réjean Samson
PY  - 2014/08
DA  - 2014/08
TI  - Modelling of Electricity Mix in Temporal Differentiated Life-Cycle-Assessment to Minimize Carbon Footprint of a Cloud Computing Service
BT  - Proceedings of the 2014 conference ICT for Sustainability
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 290
EP  - 298
SN  - 2352-538X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.35
DO  - 10.2991/ict4s-14.2014.35
ID  - Maurice2014/08
ER  -