The EMerge Alliance – an open industry association leading the rapid adoption of safe direct-current (DC) power distribution standards for commercial buildings – recently announced the completion of the EMerge Alliance Data/Telecom Center Standard.
The EMerge Alliance Data/Telecom Standard creates an integrated, open platform for power, infrastructure, peripheral devices, and control applications to facilitate the hybrid use of AC and DC power within data centers and telecommunications central offices.
This change in power distribution architecture involves making a single conversion of the incoming line of AC voltage to 380VDC and distributing it directly to rack-mounted ICT equipment, simplifying the otherwise unnecessarily complex power management provisions generally used in today’s AC-powered data centers.
Using DC power distribution in data centers significantly improves reliability and reduces equipment and operating costs, according to Dennis Symanski, senior project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and chair of the Alliance’s technical standard committee for data and telecommunications centers.
“The benefits are clear. By requiring fewer components and conversions than their AC counterparts, DC power systems in data centers suffer fewer heat related failures and require less space, energy, and maintenance to operate,” said Symanski. “DC power collection and distribution systems also simplify the use of locally generated power, providing an effective integration of on-site energy generation and storage with direct delivery of controlled power.”