WP#16 - Quantitative Analysis of Power Distribution Configurations for Data Centers

This analysis builds on the previously released “Qualitative Analysis of Power Distribution Configurations for Data Centers.” [link to white paper 4] It takes a quantitative look at one aspect of the previous paper – efficiency. This paper studies the end-to-end efficiency of eight simplified, non-redundant data center power distribution configurations. The data shows that a data center with optimized implementations of all of the topologies achieve approximately 25% higher efficiency than a typical data center of 10 years ago, delivering between 85% and 90% end-to-end efficiency over a wide load range. The highest efficiency AC and DC configurations are within 1% to 2% of each other and are only 2% to 3% better than double conversion 480Vac – 208Vac over the majority of the load range. No single configuration provides the highest efficiency at every load.