On September 9, 2019, the International Environmental Protection Organization and North China Electric Power University jointly released the report "Lighting the Green Cloud: Research on Energy Consumption and Renewable Energy Use Potential of Chinese Data Centers". The data shows that in 2018, the total power consumption of Chinese data centers It is 160.889 billion kWh, which surpassed Shanghai's total social power consumption in 2018 and accounted for 2.35% of China's total social power consumption. The report predicts that the total power consumption of China's data centers will reach 266.792 billion kWh in 2023, and will grow by 66% in the next 5 years (2019-2023), with a compound growth rate of 10.64%.
1. Data center operation and maintenance to reduce costs
The data shows that the number of data centers in China has exceeded 400,000 in 2017. With the continuous improvement of China's social informatization level, the pace of informatization construction continues to accelerate. With the rapid growth of information consumption, the construction of data centers as an important carrier of communication has also entered a period of rapid development.
China's data centers occupy a relatively high energy consumption, and the annual power consumption exceeds 1.5% of the entire society's power consumption. The power usage efficiency (PUE) of most data centers is still greater than 2.2, which is a big gap from the international advanced level. The potential is huge. At the same time, the carbon emissions generated by the large amount of electricity used by data centers consume a lot of water resources and cause great pollution after the equipment is discarded, which brings great challenges to resources and the environment. Therefore, China proposes to use PUE1.4 as an indicator to build a green data center.
Chart 1 Some green data center pilot units
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Data source: Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Energy Administration, High-tech Industry Research Lithium Battery Research Institute (GGII)
In order to improve the reliability of data center power consumption and reduce power consumption. During the "two sessions" in 2019, State Grid Co., Ltd. proposed to explore a new model of using substation resources to construct and operate charging and replacement (energy storage) stations and data center stations: multi-station integration. Multi-station integration refers to the addition of 5G base stations, Beidou ground enhancement stations, photovoltaic stations, integrated energy stations, etc. on the basis of substations, charging and replacing (energy storage) stations and data center stations, to achieve clean electricity and low-cost electricity specialty.
Using the characteristics of substation location close to users, sufficient power supply, and wide coverage of power customers, it supports data center computing, storage, linking and other functions for power and environmental service needs. Meet the needs of the construction of multiple access edge computing (MEC) stations in the construction of 5G networks, and provide IT infrastructure resources for the ubiquitous power Internet of Things to connect the physical world and the digital world.
At present, Chongqing and other provinces and cities are planning to build multi-station integration projects. Based on the business model of "co-consultation, joint construction, and win-win", Chongqing has combined substations and data in the 110 kV Shagou Substation Multi-station Integration Project The center, storage center, edge service and other functions have provided computing, storage and other services for sinking nodes of Tencent Cloud Games, iQiyi Video, and CDN (Content Delivery Network). Through cloud-side collaboration, user experience such as games and videos can be greatly improved, and new business development can be driven.
2. Application scenarios of lithium battery energy storage in data centers
UPS is the equipment that guarantees the power supply for important equipment, and the data center is configured due to its importance. When the diesel generator is installed in the A-level data center, the backup time of the UPS battery should be no less than 15 minutes. Early UPS usually used lead-acid batteries, but the penetration rate of lithium batteries is constantly increasing. In order to guarantee the power supply quality and reliability of the information equipment in the data center, a UPS is necessary and has nothing to do with economic benefits.
Chart 2 Comparison of the management difficulty of lead-acid batteries and lithium batteries
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Data source: Schneider Electric Information and Technology, High Technology Industry Research Lithium Battery Research Institute (GGII)
UPS + Storage Power Supply (SPS system for short) refers to a system that integrates UPS and energy storage. It is based on a lithium battery UPS and increases the capacity of the configured battery to achieve the purpose of building an energy storage power station. Use peak and valley electricity prices for arbitrage, and the remaining power as backup power. During occasional power failure, the battery discharges to 70% to 80%, which has little effect on battery life.
Due to the large initial investment and unstable demand in the domestic energy storage market, the development situation has been tepid. However, in the context of UPS lithium electrification and multi-station integration, overall, data center energy storage is a very valuable market segment in the current energy storage market.
Chart 3 Huawei Data Center UPS5000-S
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Data source: The company's official website, collated by Gaogong Industry Research Lithium Battery Research Institute (GGII)
3. Economic analysis of lithium battery
The power supply in the data center generally adopts a 2N UPS structure. Two sets of 2N UPS systems require a total of 4 power distribution cabinets, 2 800A frame circuit breakers and 10 250A plastic case circuit breakers. The voltage load is usually below 50%. Although the data center services are running around the clock, there are still cases where the server click rate is reduced at night and its own power consumption is reduced. And because the charging is mostly in the valley time period, the charging rate is small, and the charging time is long, the conventional load will be reduced. Therefore, the impact of the pressure on the transformer is very limited. From a hardware perspective, although the lithium battery UPS is different from the traditional lead-acid battery, the replacement of lead-acid after testing only needs to increase the power of the rectifier module, and the inverter module does not need to be changed, so it is Will affect the number of cabinets that the UPS can load.
Figure 4 UPS product composition display
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Source of data: The company's official website, collated by Gaogong Industrial Research Lithium Battery Research Institute (GGII)
In 2018, the Southern Supervision Bureau issued the "Regulations for the Implementation of the Grid-connected Operation Management and Auxiliary Service Management of the Southern Regional Electrochemical Energy Storage Power Station (Implementation)". The rules stipulate that the energy storage power station enters the charging state according to the instructions of the power dispatching agency and provides charging according to it. Peak shaving service statistics, to compensate the charging power, the specific compensation standard is 0.05 million yuan / MWh.
When the data center has an energy storage function, especially in the scenario of multi-occupancy integration, it can also participate in charging peak shaving. As long as the battery is fully managed, you can get a pretty good subsidy when responding to charge peaking. Take each energy storage UPS configured with 6 sets of LFP batteries as an example: one has 30 energy storage UPS, a total of 576kWh batteries.
In order not to affect the normal operation of the data center, the charging income from peak charging is 30 * 576kWh * 20% * 0.5 yuan / kWh = 1728 yuan, which is calculated by charging 20% of the electricity. The long-cycle characteristics of lithium batteries can also play a role in peak shaving to achieve economic benefits.
Chart 5 Lithium battery UPS cycle test chart
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Source of data: The company's official website, collated by Gaogong Industrial Research Lithium Battery Research Institute (GGII)
In addition, in areas such as Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong, where users pay more attention to the space and weight of the battery. Since the energy density of the lithium battery is 6-7 times that of the lead-acid battery, the space occupied by the lithium battery is more than 60% less than that of the lead-acid battery. The space of the computer room can be saved to place server cabinets for rental profit or reserve for later expansion. At the same time, the weight of the lithium battery is more than 70% lighter than the lead-acid battery, so it can greatly reduce the pressure on the load bearing of the floor, so that the cost of load-bearing transformation can be greatly reduced, and the environmental constraints of the data center can be reduced. Continuous improving.
Figure 6 Comparison of data center battery solution footprint
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Data source: Schneider Electric Information Technology, GGII
4. Demand scale of DC equipment room for lithium batteries
At present, data centers can be divided into six major application scenarios: telecommunications, Internet, public institutions, manufacturing, energy, and finance. Taking the telecommunications industry as an example, driven by the high growth rate of 5G construction, the construction speed of the telecommunications industry data center has also continued to increase.
In the 5G era, the amount of cloud computing will increase significantly, and the construction / expansion of data rooms will increase the demand for batteries. As the space of the computer room is determined, the future battery expansion can only rely on batteries that make the battery energy density higher, so the penetration rate of lithium batteries in the data center will continue to increase. Through investigation and calculation, GGII will increase the demand for lithium batteries of 5.8GWh in 5G telecommunications equipment rooms from 2019 to 2025, and the penetration rate of lithium batteries will increase year by year.
In the field of Internet and manufacturing, with the demand for industrial Internet and edge computing approaching the outbreak period, the number of future construction is also considerable. For the manufacturing data center, since the energy storage of the data center can be coordinated with production electricity, its construction is more feasible.
