Economic Benefits of Green Data Centers

While there are compelling concerns about the environmental impact of data centers, myriad opportunities exist for data centers to improve sustainability practices while maintaining profitability. Adopting renewable energy paired with storage, advanced cooling systems that operate more efficiently than traditional chillers, and workload scheduling techniques can lead to long-term economic savings for data center operators. Data centers of all sizes and configurations can take steps to improve their operational efficiency.

 

Public policy undergraduate student Avery Smedley offers explores the relationship between data center environmental goals and economic imperatives. Ultimately, stakeholders in the data center space are increasingly recognizing the benefits to retrofitting existing data centers to operate more efficiently, and to constructing new data centers more sustainably as both a cost-savings and environmental measure.