Download critical facilities data center7/17/2023 ![]() ![]() It was estimated that in 2020, data centers comprised approximately 2% of total US electricity consumption, with an annual consumption growth rate of 4% (Shehabi et al., 2016, 2018). In the next phase of our research, we plan to interview data center operators/experts to ground-truth our literature findings and collaboratively design decarbonization policy solutions that target organizational structure, empower individual staff, and foster a supportive external market. Our findings from the literature review suggest that (1) technological solutions are abundant in the literature but fall short of providing practical guidance on the pitfalls of implementation, (2) making energy efficiency a priority at the executive level of organizations will be largely ineffective if the IT and facilities staff are not directly incentivized to increase EE, and (3) there is minimal current understanding of how the individual psychologies of IT and facilities staff affect EE implementation in DCs. We develop a public Zotero library, perform content coding, and complete a rudimentary network analysis. We also consider related fields such as organizational behavioral management and energy intensive buildings. Our research demystifies the complex interactions between humans and DCs, by asking What non-technical barriers impede EE investment decision-making and/or implementing energy management strategies? To begin to answer this question, we perform a literature review of 86 resources, ranging from peer-reviewed journal publications to handbooks. Moreover, the literature tends to focus on technology solutions such as improvements to IT equipment, cooling infrastructure, and software, without addressing organizational and psychological drivers. The task of studying EE in DCs is complicated by the interconnected nature of humans and mission-critical technical systems. As our country increasingly relies on information technology (IT), our data centers (DCs) will need to increase their energy efficiency (EE) to stabilize their energy consumption. It was last estimated that in 2020, data centers comprised approximately 2% of total US electricity consumption, with an estimated annual growth rate of 4%. ![]()
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