Like other industries before it , data centres could soon become the beating heart of many communities , with the market landscape potentially a few steps away from facilities becoming providers of much more than just data . This could not only enable each facility to achieve a reduction in its own carbon footprint , but of the wider community ’ s too . Here , Gemma Reeves , Business Unit Manager in Data Centres at Alfa Laval , explains how to achieve this goal and what legislative changes are required to make it a reality .
s much as 40 % of the verage data centre ’ s energy usage
A can be attributed solely to cooling . Alternatives to traditional air-cooling systems , such as immersion cooling , are becoming more popular and have made systems more efficient by using less energy and water . However , with data usage increasingly nearly exponentially each year , these efficiency gains may struggle to keep pace with demand .
Moreover , given that summer temperatures in excess of 40 ° C have been observed in the UK , a system change is clearly needed sooner than later . In this regard , it can be argued that wasted energy is a wasted opportunity . This is because fundamentally , in the data centre market , current processes generate a large amount of heat that is being rejected to the environment – heat that could be leveraged .
Regardless of the challenges our environment continues to face , digital systems will remain vital due to the value they bring . Leveraging heat reclaimed from data centres could soon be key because reducing heat supply chains will be central to increasing local resilience . The need for continuous operation and observing strict temperature control requirements also make data centres an excellent choice for use in heat networks , while also creating new revenue streams for data centres through selling waste heat on to be utilised elsewhere .
Waste heat potential
Waste heat from an immersion-based system can reach 40-60 ° C . Temperatures in this range are ideal for fourth generation district heat networks and can be utilised through technologies such as modern plate heat exchangers . This allows these schemes to use close approaches within a single degree to create more efficient systems where little heat is wasted . With this in mind , it is unsurprising that demand for such schemes continues to grow .
Recently , Alfa Laval helped install such a system in a Danish data centre , where the residual heat from servers was used to power a local heating network . The resulting saving from this was over 100,000MW / h of energy – enough to provide heat and hot water to 6,900 homes .
LEVERAGING HEAT RECLAIMED FROM DATA CENTRES COULD SOON BE KEY BECAUSE REDUCING HEAT SUPPLY CHAINS WILL BE CENTRAL TO INCREASING LOCAL RESILIENCE .
Putting data centres at the heart of communities
62 www . intelligentdatacentres . com