Exergy-based life cycle assessment (E-LCA) of cloud computing

Abstract

The environment has been under constant stress from continuing population growth and climate change. Generally communication network infrastructure is becoming a growing portion of the energy footprint in information and communication technology. The current industrial system, especially information and commutation technologies, must deal with its sustainability challenges in the production and energy consumption systems. Various frameworks are introduced and used within interconnected disciplines to analyze environmental sustainability issues and generate solutions for end-to-end energy management. Up to now, no clear principle has been de ned to analyze thermodynamic improvement potential in communication systems. Currently, there are only few practical research examples available on thermodynamic based life cycle scale. This thesis deals with cloud computing life cycle from a thermodynamic perspective in order to analyze ineciencies in dierent life time stages and propose improvement potential. To this end we merged two analytical tools, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Exergy Analysis, which allow us to study thermodynamic irreversibility and improvement potential from the life cycle prospective. Exergy-based life cycle assessment (E-LCA), which is a powerful integration tool, allows us to calculate the exergy consumption as impact category in the established life cycle framework. In this thesis, we study rst the development of a lifetime exergy consumption model, primarily for dierent ICT equipment such as enterprise servers, routers, switches and PCs. Afterward, we create a data base for dierent devices by combining the disassembly and analytical analysis data based on literature research with aggregation of energy use for manufacturing, operation and raw material phases. Finally we use these data for assessing the overall exergy consumption of cloud computing in Austria. The overall cloud-based lifetime exergy consumption model is applied to dierent case studies examining the eects of variance in transportation modes, raw material reutilization and dierent lifespan assumption.