Global Marginal Carbon Footprint Evaluation of Internet Services with Building Energy Models

Abstract

Over the last decade, operational e_ciency optimiza- tions in data center (DC) facilities designs have cur- tailed their absolute power demands. However, their physical footprint is still growing. This growth in ca- pacity may o_set the e_ciency gains at best or may even increase the power demand in absolute terms. Such o_setting e_ects make system level life cycle environmental footprint evaluations complex for dis- tributed services operating in these DCs. To support system level evaluations for services op- erating in DCs, this research uses simulated net- work tra_c pro_les and coincident energy generation source aware building energy models (BEM) to evalu- ate the marginal carbon footprint of a globally span- ning network of data centers. The result of this re- search is a prototype of a BEM based framework that can be used in environmental decisions to character- ize DC life-cycle costs at internet service levels.