On February 17, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Central Internet Information Office, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the National Energy Board four departments jointly issued a notice announcing that the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta and other eight places to start the construction of the national arithmetic hub node, the planning of 10 data center clusters.

Following the "South-to-North Water Diversion" "West-to-East Electricity Transmission" "West-to-East Gas Transmission" and other projects, another major national strategic project kicked off.

After all, in the context of carbon neutral targets set, the data center carbon reduction pressure is obvious. The National Development and Reform Commission has publicly stated that increasing the layout of data centers in the west will significantly increase the proportion of green energy use, close to the elimination of green energy in the west, and at the same time continue to optimize the efficiency of the use of energy in data centers through technological innovation, large for small, low-carbon development and other measures.

Promoting synergy between East and West

The so-called "East counts, West counts", "counts" refers to data, "counts" is the power of calculation, "counts" is the power of calculation.

Analysts believe that the essence of the "East Counts West Counts" project is to resolve the current mismatch between the arithmetic demand required for the vigorous development of various types of digital economy and the growth rate of China's arithmetic contradictions.

The National Development and Reform Commission of the Department of High Technology, said the relevant person in charge, at present, the scale of China's data center has reached 5 million standard racks, the arithmetic power of 130EFLOPS (thirteen hundred billion floating point operations per second). With the full and continuous penetration of digital technology into all areas of the economy and society, the whole society is still very urgent need for computing power, and is expected to continue to grow at a rate of more than 20% per year.

At the same time, most of China's data centers are located in the eastern region, and the rate of data centers in the western region is still at a low level. The 2021 China Data Center Market Report shows that the overall rack rate of the country is 50.1%, East China, North China, South China is about 65% 68%, Central China is 39%, and the northwest and southwest of the western region are 34% and 41% respectively, which is lower than the average level.

However, due to the increasingly tight land, energy and other resources, the large-scale development of data centers in the East is unsustainable, and it is necessary to alleviate this contradiction through the reconfiguration of technology and space.

From the perspective of the rhythm of engineering advancement, the layout adjustment of data centers is advancing in a gradual manner. On the one hand, for background processing, offline analysis, storage backup and other business that does not require high network requirements, can take the lead in transferring to the west, by the western data (Inner Mongolia, Guizhou, Gansu, Ningxia) center to undertake. On the other hand, for businesses with higher network requirements, such as industrial Internet, financial securities, disaster warning, telemedicine, video calls, artificial intelligence reasoning, etc., they can be laid out in the eastern hubs of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, and Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao-Great Bay Area, to ensure that arithmetic deployment is coordinated and sustainable with resources such as land, energy, water, and electricity.

Energy Potential in the West

It is worth noting that the reason why the layout of data centers has shifted to the west lies first and foremost in the urgent need for data centers to reduce carbon emissions.

As energy-consuming "behemoths" that consume energy and emit carbon throughout their lifecycle, data centers have seen rapid growth in energy consumption and carbon emissions in recent years.

According to the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, Environmental Planning Institute experts estimate that in 2021, the national data center energy consumption reached 216.6 billion kilowatt-hours, an increase of 44% over 2020, accounting for about 2.6% of the total social electricity consumption; carbon dioxide emissions of about 135 million tons, an increase of 39.15 million tons in 2020, accounting for about 1.14% of the national carbon dioxide emissions.

At the same time, the above experts predicted that the "14th Five-Year Plan" "15th Five-Year Plan" period, in the iron and steel, cement, chemical, non-ferrous and other industries to gradually achieve the carbon peak and enter the platform period, the data center to become a small number of industries continue to grow carbon dioxide emissions.

By 2025, the total energy consumption of the national data center will reach 350 billion kWh, accounting for about 4% of the whole society's electricity consumption, power utilization (PUE) 1.30; 210 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for the proportion of national carbon dioxide emissions of close to 2%, the carbon emissions intensity (CUE) of 0.76. By 2030, the total energy consumption of national data centers By 2030, the total energy consumption of national data centers will be 591.5 billion kilowatt-hours, accounting for more than 5% of the total electricity consumption of the whole society, and the utilization rate of electricity (PUE) will be reduced to less than 1.30; the carbon dioxide emissions will be about 340 million tons, accounting for nearly 3% of the national carbon dioxide emissions.

On the other hand, China's western region is rich in resources, especially renewable energy, with the development of data centers, to take over the eastern arithmetic demand potential. It is understood that the western region of renewable energy resources account for more than 70% of the total national resources. Among them, wind resources accounted for more than 85%, solar resources accounted for about 90%.

More importantly, the data center's arithmetic and load demand will significantly increase the proportion of green energy use, alleviating the temporal and spatial contradiction between China's renewable energy resources and electricity load.

Although China's current abandoned wind, abandoned light rate has been declining, the wind and energy consumption continue to improve, but from the regional distribution point of view, the west, especially in the northwestern part of the region is still the consumption of the "puddle".

The national new energy consumption monitoring and early warning center released data show that in 2021, the annual PV utilization rate of 98%, wind power utilization rate of 96.9%, but which the wind power utilization rate of 89.3% in Qinghai region, PV utilization rate of 86.2%; Xinjiang and Mengxi wind power utilization rate of 92.7% and 91.10% respectively.

The National Development and Reform Commission said that the next step will be to strengthen the energy layout linkage, strengthen the data center and power grid integration design, and promote renewable energy power generation enterprises to the data center power supply. Support data center clusters supporting renewable energy power station.

Western Securities research report shows that through the "East counts west counts" can be placed in the high power consumption data centers in the west with rich wind, light, hydropower resources in the region, not only to achieve the goal of carbon reduction, but also to stimulate the construction of new energy and ancillary facilities demand.