A Comparison of AC and DC Power Distribution in the Data Center

The quest for improved efficiency of data centers has encouraged a climate of innovation in data center power and cooling technologies. In the early 1990s, manufacturers and engineers have suggested a conversion of the data center power architecture to DC from the existing AC. Despite a predicted a widespread adoption of a DC standard for data center power and evidence that a change to DC distribution is advantageous, the usage of DC relative to AC has declined. Recently, new proposals have been made based on high voltage DC distribution. These methods overcome some of the earlier problems with DC power. However, The latest high efficiency AC and DC power distribution architectures are shown to have virtually the same efficiency, suggesting that a move to a DC-based architecture is unwarranted on the basis of efficiency.