Reducing the Break-even Time by Smart Power Managing in Data Center with Renewable Energy

Due to the increasing cost and environmental impacts of fossil fuel consumption, using the renewable energies in data center has become an important and essential priority. Although using renewable energies has less environmental harmful effects, but the high investment needed for their installations as well as their fluctuating power production characteristic, restricts their usage such that most of data center's managers prefer to use brown energy instead. In this paper, the power management and cost reduction techniques, with the aim of reducing break-even time, like using the electricity pricing model's opportunity and distributed Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) has been considered. In each time slot, the proposed Smart Power Manager Unit (SPMU) specifies the optimized distribution of power between available power supplies based on available solar energy, the price of electricity and the status of distributed UPS batteries; it also manages batteries charging and discharging. Results show that proposed method reduces the break-even time of investment cost on solar power installation to 0/8- 1/2 years that is 36% shorter than conventional method on average.