EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

DAVID CRAIG , CEO , ICEOTOPE

he data centre industry

Another important sustainability factor which is under-reported is water use . The industry uses vast amounts of it . Immersion cooling consumes zero water as opposed to billions of litres of water with air cooling strategies used in many data centres across the globe .

So , while data centres globally are using vast amounts of water , with precision cooling , there ’ s water in the process , however , it doesn ’ t get consumed . Allowing for maintenance and water loop refreshes , you can very easily be looking at 95 %+ water reductions .

Another hinderance to sustainability is better heat recovery and better heat reuse . It is possible to capture virtually all of the heat from the electronics efficiently , which you can ’ t do easily or very usefully with air . And then that heat can be reused and repurposed into district heating loops and in buildings .

If a data centre operator was to use renewable energy , then using liquid cooling intelligently , the PUE ratio can get as close to one as possible . This would provide the site with a very strong sustainable performance overall .

There are other factors , with greater density of electronics , which immersion cooling permits – you need less physical space and there is less physical hardware deployed and infrastructure . This means you can repurpose space much more effectively . It ’ s often said that ‘ the cleanest data centres are the ones you already own ’ or perhaps the ‘ extra space you didn ’ t build ’ because it simply wasn ’ t necessary .

Immersion cooling is less harsh on the electronics , hence getting better life out of them which assists dramatically to lowering the carbon footprint of dealing with and managing electronics in remote and also traditional data centre applications .

All servers are designed to be air-cooled . If you designed liquid-cooled servers , they are smaller and more efficient . At the simplest level , the supply chains for servers become hugely reduced . This would be a significant step when you

consider the data centre industry emitted 160 million tonnes of CO ₂ in 2020 .

So , how does immersion cooling help data centre operators meet their sustainability goals ? By very simply consuming less rare and polluting resources to help meet all our targets . Reducing the cost of those resources , reducing the cost of the buildings , facilities and locations , reducing the costs of running the centre through much less use of electricity and water , lowering the cost of managing and maintaining , and then ultimately reducing the cost of the supply chains that are involved . www . intelligentdatacentres . com

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