High Performance Data Centers and Energy Efficiency Potential in Greece

Data centers are amongst the most complex and energy demanding building environments. The trends of increasing data center capacity and power use by information technology equipment, re-emphasize the need to reduce cooling loads, first cost for HVAC equipment, and finally related energy and operational costs. The first part of the paper presents an overview of relevant information and available resources for the efficient design and operation of these critical environments. The second part considers two large data centers located in Athens that serve two major Hellenic banks as case studies in order to investigate and quantify the potential measures for improving their energy performance. The two facilities were audited and actual energy consumption were used for an energy assessment. According to simulation results of various efficiency measures, the Power Usage Effectiveness may be improved from 2.49 to 2.11 for the first case study and from 1.89 to 1.66 for the second one.