Cutting the electric bill for internet-scale systems
Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 conference on Data communication
Renewable energy provisioning for ICT services in a future internet
The future internet
Greening geographical load balancing
Proceedings of the ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
Renewable and cooling aware workload management for sustainable data centers
Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE joint international conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
DATE '12 Proceedings of the Conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe
Energy and carbon-efficient placement of virtual machines in distributed cloud data centers
Euro-Par'13 Proceedings of the 19th international conference on Parallel Processing
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Given the significant energy consumption of data centers, improving their energy efficiency is an important social problem. However, energy efficiency is necessary but not sufficient for sustainability, which demands reduced usage of energy from fossil fuels. This paper investigates the feasibility of powering internet-scale systems using (nearly) entirely renewable energy. We perform a trace-based study to evaluate three issues related to achieving this goal: the impact of geographical load balancing, the role of storage, and the optimal mix of renewables. Our results highlight that geographical load balancing can significantly reduce the required capacity of renewable energy by using the energy more efficiently with "follow the renewables" routing. Further, our results show that small-scale storage can be useful, especially in combination with geographical load balancing, and that an optimal mix of renewables includes significantly more wind than photovoltaic solar.