Building a data center's components can cause more emissions than its entire lifetime operation.

Data centers consume a nonnegligible share of the world's energy and risk increasing both greenhouse gas emissions and electronic waste. Usually, engineers design the physical hardware and the control software separately, and they rarely make sustainability their main goal. To solve this, researchers built a control co-design framework that optimizes the physical plant and its software controller at the exact same time. The framework tracks sustainability across three whole lifecycle stages: manufacturing, operation, and disposal. When the researchers tested this setup on a microgrid-driven data center, it produced a family of sustainability metrics linked directly to system parameters. Crucially, they found that greenhouse-gas-equivalent emissions from manufacturing parts can dwarf the emissions created during the system's actual operation. Ultimately, the designs chosen by this framework achieved substantial improvements in environmental sustainability categories when compared to standard baseline design procedures.

Why it matters

Data centers consume huge amounts of energy and produce greenhouse gases and electronic waste. This work shows that the pollution from manufacturing their components can be worse than from running them, so designing for sustainability must consider the entire lifecycle. The framework helps engineers optimize both the physical design and control systems to reduce overall environmental impact.

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