Life Cycle Assessment of Edge Data Centers: Case Study in Presence of Renewable Energy and Refurbished Servers

As the demand for computing power increases, the ecological footprint of data centers becomes a critical concern. Evaluating and mitigating this trend is essential to ensure a sustainable future for digital technologies. This article addresses the issue by comparing the environmental impacts of a solar-powered edge data center (SDC) with refurbished servers and a conventional edge data center (CDC). The comparison is conducted using a multicriteria life cycle assessment for both data center types, focusing on indicators such as climate change, depletion of abiotic resources, acidification, ionizing radiation, and particle emissions. Our results indicate that, under a reference data center design scenario, SDC achieves a reduction in environmental impact ranging from 11% to 60% compared to CDC. This advantage is maintained when scaling up both data centers. Further reductions, up to 92% for some indicators, are possible by leveraging SDC characteristics such as increased solar energy use, grid energy integration, and extended compute node lifetimes. Our analysis shows that the environmental overhead of replacing components during server refurbishment in SDC is minimal, ranging from 1% to 6%, thereby reinforcing the sustainability and reliability of SDC. This comparative study illustrates the potential for edge data centers to yield positive environmental outcomes. Finally, we discuss the limitations and potential improvements of this study, as well as the challenges associated with deploying SDC and CDC in specific environments and for particular tasks.