At the beginning of this year, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Network Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the National Energy Administration jointly issued a notice, agreeing to start the construction of national computing hub nodes in eight places, including Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Yangtze River Delta, Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, Chengdu-Chongqing, Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu and Ningxia, and planning 10 national data center clusters, and the “East number West calculation” project was officially launched.

Under the guidance of the 14th Five-Year Plan, “East count West count” and other policies, data centers, as the underlying support of the digital economy, have also ushered in a golden age of development. Opportunities and challenges coexist, and data centers, as a high-load industry, are duty-bound to promote the process of carbon neutrality in an orderly manner.

Under the influence of a variety of factors, how to achieve the “development” and “carbon neutrality” of the data center industry has become the focus of common attention of upstream and downstream enterprises in the industry.

Data center power supply and distribution face challenges

As an indispensable source of energy for data centers, electricity has put forward new requirements and greater challenges for data center power supply and distribution systems under the influence of policies such as “East count West count” and “carbon neutrality”. In view of the development trend of data center power supply and distribution, how to achieve digitalization and data intelligence in data center power supply and distribution, IDC reporters interviewed Zhao Yongzhan, president of ABB Electric China.

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ABB Electric China President Zhao Yongzhan

ABB, as an international electrical industry leader, has been deeply involved in China’s west-east power transmission, south-to-north water transfer and other important national strategic projects, and the “East number West calculation” project is also deeply involved. Zhao Yongzhan said that in ABB’s view, the same as the west-east power transmission and south-north water diversion projects, the “east-west count” project will also be a long-term strategic project with a large investment scale and a long construction period.

Compared with the previous two, “East to West” also has its particularity, “on the one hand,” East to west “project compared with the west to east power transmission, south-to-north water transfer, its civil engineering is less, on the other hand, in the context of rapid digital transformation, the demand for computing power is growing exponentially, so as an important computing infrastructure, data center for the speed of the construction period is extremely high. Zhao Yongzhan stressed.

With the gradual advancement of the “East number West calculation” project, as well as the deepening of the carbon neutral process, the data center energy supply is no longer simply from thermal power, more and more applications such as wind power, hydropower, photovoltaic, but also make the data center power supply and distribution system more complex, data center power supply and distribution system is facing more challenges, data center power distribution into the era of change. Zhao Yongzhan said that no matter where the power source is, there is only one goal for the data center power supply and distribution – security and stability, “at this stage, in the case of more and more renewable energy applications, how to ensure that these supply of ‘unstable’ renewable energy in the data center ‘stable’ application, has become a ‘top priority’.” Zhao Yongzhan stressed.

At the same time, in Zhao Yongzhan’s view, in addition to the higher requirements for the deployment speed, the environmental protection, use efficiency, and the degree of intensification of the equipment have been put forward.