China IDC circle learns about that National Development and Reform Commission issued a notice on the 4th day of this month—Notice on Cleaning Out and Regulating The Charging of Power Grid and Transfer Power Supply Links. It is required to cancel some monopolistic service charging items of power grid enterprises, comprehensively cleaning up the unreasonable price increase behavior of the standardized transfer power supply link, and accelerate the implementation of the already-issued power grid fee-curtailing policy.

According to the official state, the general industrial and commercial electricity price will be reduced by 10% on average, the National Development and Reform Commission has issued the Notice on Reducing General Industrial and Commercial Electricity Prices (Development and Reform Price [2018] No. 500) and Notice about Adjusting the VAT in Power Industry to Correspondingly Reduce the General Industrial And Commercial Electricity Price (Development and Reform Price [2018] No. 732) and other documents, and deployed five price reduction measures to reduce the burden on enterprises.

 

The Notice points out that some of the monopolistic service charges of grid companies shall be cancelled. (1) The expenses incurred by the power transmission and distribution and related services provided by the power grid enterprises shall be included in the transmission and distribution costs, and shall be recovered through the transmission and distribution price, and shall not be charged to the users in disguised form or in other names. (2) It is required that provincial-level price authorities shall strengthen supervision, further clear up the charges of power grid enterprises, and reduce the cost of electricity for industrial and commercial enterprises. The monopolistic service charging items that need to be retained shall be strictly managed according to the local pricing catalogue and the list of operating service charges that are subject to government pricing, and shall be open to the public and actively accept the supervision of the society; no item that is not on the list shall be charged. 

 

As we all know, the data center is nicknamed as “electric tiger”. First, its demand for electricity is large, and it needs to provide customers with uninterrupted 24-hour service. Second, it operates a variety of equipment and consumes a lot of power. According to the White Paper on the Status of Energy Consumption of China's Data Centers, the data center's electricity consumption reached 100 billion kWh in 2015, and the annual electricity consumption exceeded 1.5% of the total social electricity consumption. It is estimated that the total annual electricity consumption of the data center will reach138 billion kWh 2020, and the electricity consumption will be as high as 5% of global electricity consumption.

 

According to statistics, the total power consumption of global data centers has already accounted for 3% of global electricity usage. According to industry analysts, by 2025, the total amount of electricity used by global data centers is estimated to exceed 10 billion US dollars based on current electricity prices, and the compound annual growth rate will reach 6%. According to the statistics of relevant units, the electricity cost of China's data center accounts for 60%-70% of the total cost of data center operation and maintenance. According to industry insiders, the annual electricity bill for the B-level data center is as high as RMB 200 million (RMB 1 / kWh).

 

Faced with such a large amount of electricity consumption, how to reduce the power consumption of the data center? How to save electricity? IDC manufacturers rack their brains to solve the problem! And the issuance of the notice is undoubtedly a “paramount” welfare for the data centers. It is estimated that the operating cost of the data center will be reduced by at least 35%.