A Survey of Renewable Energy Approaches in Cloud Data Centers

The increasing demand for cloud computing and cloud storage services in recent years have caused the unprecedented growth of data centers in the world. As the main consumers of energy, these growing data centers spend a lot of money on their power consumption every year. One of the most important consequences of the power production process is the increase in environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The power sector which is dependent on fossil fuels, is one of the main sources of carbon dioxide emissions in the world and plays a significant role in increasing greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to global warming and accelerated climate change. Therefore, the problem of enhancing and transforming the process of generation and consumption of energy in data centers and utilizing energy-efficient technologies has become more important. To overcome this problem, it is essential to integrate renewable energy as a clean source of energy, inexhaustible and always available, into data centers. In this article, we provide a taxonomy of the literature on methods of production, utilization, forecasting, and management of renewable energy integration into data centers. We discuss research challenges and open issues for future work to facilitate current and future researchers to work on the research problems in the field of renewable energy utilization in cloud data centers.