Dear Colleagues,

As the demand for data continues to increase, the datacenter industry is expanding at a staggering rate. According to statistics, the total scale and growth rate of the digital economy ranked among the highest in the world. As the bearer of the digital economy, datacenters are also increasing day by day, and the construction volume and scale are constantly expanding. As datacenters require large amounts of power to keep servers, storage devices, backups, cooling systems, and other infrastructure running, energy consumption and carbon emissions are growing rapidly. It is more important than ever that organizations address sustainability and reduce their carbon footprints. Datacenters are energy intensive, requiring a great deal of energy and resources. Various estimates have suggested that datacenters account for 2% of the world’s energy consumption—roughly equivalent to the aviation industry. While big strides have been made, designing, developing, and operating sustainable datacenters remains one of the biggest challenges facing developers, researchers, co-location operators, global cloud computing providers, and hyperscalers alike. Many organizations seek to cut back the energy consumption with the goal of eventually reaching net-zero carbon emissions. Datacenters are facing severe challenges in energy conservation and greenhouse gas emissions, and how to achieve green, low-carbon, and high-quality development deserves special attention. Hence, it is important and necessary to understand how to improve the datacenter sustainability with the right design and practices.

The goal of this Special Issue is to look at and share recent advances in theory, design, modeling, application, control, practices, reviews, and case studies related to the advancement of sustainability management in zero-carbon datacenters, as well as exploration and analysis of the relationship among electricity, energy, and IT equipment for sustainable solutions. Specifically, the aim of relevant research is to realize the all-round closed-loop of carbon management processes, such as carbon inventory, carbon verification, carbon trading, carbon transformation, and carbon evaluation in datacenters, to investigate the trading mechanism datacenters participating in the electricity-carbon market to achieve zero carbon targets, and to build a multi-faceted and multi-level intelligent governance system for zero-carbon datacenters.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews presenting recent developments, challenges, and opportunities related to the sustainability management strategies and practices in zero-carbon datacenters in both classical and emerging fields are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Datacenter energy management strategies,
• Datacenter interaction with the smart grid system,
• Renewable energy utilization in datacenters,
• Energy and carbon balance in zero-carbon datacenters,
• Cooling/thermal management in datacenters,
• Energy storage devices configuration and management,
• Configuration and capacity planning of datacenters,
• Load prediction for both energy supply and consumption,
• Demand response participation strategies for datacenters,
• Sustainability management practices of decarbonizing,
• Datacenter carbon footprint accounting standards and evaluation model,
• Datacenter carbon emission reduction potential evaluation method,
• Overall plan, model, and form of low-carbon development of datacenters,
• Low carbon benefit simulation and evaluation system for datacenters,
• “Carbon neutral” datacenters energy operation and control,
• Low-carbon operation mode and market trading mechanism of datacenters,
• Energy conservation and carbon reduction project practices in datacenters,
• Carbon emissions trading in datacenters.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Xiaoying Wang
Prof. Dr. Yanbo Chen
Dr. Yujuan Fang
Dr. Hengrui Ma
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• green computing
• zero carbon
• energy-efficient computing
• renewable utilization
• zero-carbon datacenter
• Artificial Intelligence
• low carbon
• electricity-carbon market
• carbon emission reduction