Data centers, as one of the increasing load shares of electrical consumption, encounter different challenges in supplying their load. Due to the economic restrictions, environmental issues, physical space limitations, and availability, distributed energy resources are popular than traditional power networks, so that the data center owners select them for their load. Distributed energy resources based on renewable energy are subject to attention today, and the number of them will be increasing day by day. Due to the high potential and characteristics of modern microgrids, these resources as microgrid elements can answer for the data center load properly. In this paper, different structures of renewable-based distributed generation resources for a typical data center will be discussed. Then, some advantages and disadvantages of each resource in different structures are described in detail. Potential, capacities, and challenges faced by future data centers have been demonstrated, and the latest achievements and methods in each DER resource have been reviewed. In the techno-economic and environmental aspects, each model with different renewable resources like wind turbines, solar systems, battery energy storage systems, hydropower, and hydrogen energy storage is compared and analyzed completely.
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