Can nanogenerators contribute to the global greening data centres?

In past two decades, global data centres had become a major sector of energy consumption. In 2010, the consuming power of global data centres accounted for about 1.5% in the global electricity; however, by 2020, it was estimated that the power consumption of global data centres will account for over 8% of the global power usage. Although many outstanding practices had been conduted to improving the PUE (Power usage effectiveness) of data centres, the traditional approaches seem to have reached a ceiling by far. Meanwhile, the remarkable improvement in power efficacy of nanogenerators (NGs) in past five years, especially the discovery of triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs), could offer intriguing prospects to further improve the PUE of data centres. Through an interdisciplinary perspective, an exploratory energy saving approach for GDCs (greening data centres) based on nanogenerators is proposed, which is defined as DEHNs (distributed energy harvesting via nanogenerators). In the proposed DEHNs, the different types of NGs are supposed to flexibly integrated into established or new data centres to further improve energy usageefficiency. Basically, as a potential ingredient in contributing to GDCs, DEHNs could offer a moderate promise, but also have limitations and challenges. Image 1 • The possible applications of nanogenerators in global greening data centers are explored. • A framework based on NGs to improve traditional PUE of data centers is proposed. • Three approaches based on NGs are reasoned to improve the PUE of data centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]