Interxion has cut energy costs at its Stockholm, Sweden data center (pictured) by 80 percent using a cooling system that gets chilled water from the sea, and Google uses a similar technique in Hamina, Finland, ZDNet reports.
Data center cooling ideas and technologies continue to grow, according to the news site, which says using the naturally cold seawater has helped Interxion decrease the PUE of its facility below 1.1. The data center operator circulates the chilled water through the data center multiple times, which it says results in an additional reduction in overall cooling energy use.
Additionally, as the temperature of the cooling water heats up, it is rerouted to provide heat to homes and offices in Stockholm.
In another example of using data center waste energy, in Vancouver, Canada, energy provider FortisBC has partnered with Telus and Westbank to provide heat and hot water to a $750 million office and residential project.
The 1 million-square-foot development will use waste heat generated at a Telus data center. The companies expect the planned office tower to achieve LEED platinum certification and the planned residential tower to achieve LEED gold certification, in which the waste heat plays an important role.
Glacial water also cools the Deltalis RadixCloud data center, located deep inside a mountain near the Swiss Gotthard massif.
In other efforts to provide more energy efficient cooling to data centers, Facebook’s Forest City, NC and Prineville, Ore. data centers use outside air to keep servers cool, and last year Intel partnered with South Korean telecom company KT Corporation to test cooling technology that the companies say, if applied to every KT-owned center, would save $7.6 million annually.
In January, Emerson Network Power received a US patent for its Liebert XD cooling technology that the company says can reduce a data center’s air conditioning energy consumption up to 30 percent when utilized as supplemental cooling and up to 70 percent when deployed as the primary cooling.
Last month, the Department of Defense selected Asetek’s ISAC (Inside Server Air Conditioning) liquid-cooling product to participate in its Transformative Reductions in Operational Energy Consumption (TROPEC) program. The company has also built a demonstration room in its San Jose, Calif. office to showcase its RackCDU, ISAC and internal loop liquid cooling solutions for servers and data centers.
About half the power used by a typical data centers supports its infrastructure, including cooling systems, according to the US Department of Energy.