4082018 How to Reuse Waste Hea om Data Centers intelligently
Knowledge
Air conditioning units at one of the facilities by European data center provider Interxion. (Photo: Interxion)
BUSINESS
How to Reuse Waste Heat from Data Centers Intelligently
There are two big problems with reusing server exhaust heat, but there
are also good solutions to both of them
Mark Monroe | May 10, 2016
hitps:luwn.dataconterknowledge,comiprin! 146426 46owiosr20%8 How to Reuse Waste Heat rom Data Centers intaligenty
Data centers worldwide are energy transformation devices. They draw in raw
electric power on one side, spin a few electrons around, spit out a bit of useful
work, and then shed more than 98 percent of the electricity as not-so-useful low-
grade heat energy. They are almost the opposite of hydroelectric dams and wind
turbines, which transform kinetic energy of moving fluids into clean, cheap,
highly transportable electricity to be consumed tens or hundreds of miles away.
Power goes in Heat rejected
Work comes out
Image: Energetic Consulting
But maybe data centers don’t have to be the complete opposite of generation
facilities. Energy transformation is not inherently a bad thing. Cradle-to-Cradle
author and thought leader William McDonough teaches companies how to think
differently, so that process waste isn't just reduced , but actively reused. This
same thinking can be applied to data center design so that heat-creating
operations like data centers might be paired with heat-consuming operations like
district energy systems, creating a closed-loop system that has no waste.
It’s not a new idea for data centers. There are dozens of examples around the
globe of data centers cooperating with businesses in the area to turn waste heat
into great heat. Lots of people know about IBM in Switzerland reusing data center
heat to warm a local swimming pool. In Finland, data centers by Yandex and
Academica share heat with local residents, replacing the heat energy used by 500-
1000 homes with data center energy that would have been vented to the
atmosphere. There are heat-reuse data centers in Canada , England , even the US.
tps: datacenterknowledge,comiprin/146426 216owiosr20r8 How to Reuse Waste Hea rm Dala Cenars inaligntly
Cloud computing giant Amazon has gotten great visibility from reuse of a nearby
data center's heat at the biosphere project in downtown Seattle.
Rendering of an Amazon campus currently under construction in Seattle's Denny
Triangle neighborhood
Crank Up the Temperature
There are two big issues with data center waste heat reuse: the relatively low
temperatures involved and the difficulty of transporting heat. Many of the reuse
applications to date have used the low-grade server exhaust heat in an application
physically adjacent to the data center, such as a greenhouse or swimming pool in
the building next door. This is reasonable given the relatively low temperatures of
data center return air, usually between 28° and 35°C (80-95°F), and the difficulty
in moving heat around. Moving heat energy frequently requires insulated ducting
or plumbing instead of cheap, convenient electrical cables. Trenching and
installation to run a hot water pipe from a data center to a heat user may cost as
much as $600 per linear foot . Just the piping to share heat with a facility one-
quarter mile away might add $750,000 or more to a data center construction
project. There’s currently not much that can be done to reduce this cost.
To address the low-temperature issue, some data center operators have started
using heat pumps to increase the temperature of waste heat, making the thermal
energy much more valuable, and marketable. Waste heat coming out of heat
pumps at temperatures in the range of 55° to 70°C (130-160°F) can be transferred
to a liquid medium for easier transport and can be used in district heating,
commercial laundry, industrial process heat, and many more. There are even
tps: datacenterknowledge,comiprin/146426 318owiosr20%8 How to Reuse Waste Heat rom Data Centers intaligenty
High Temperature (HT) and Very High Temperature (VHT) heat pumps capable
of moving low-grade data center heat up to 140°C.
/ Heat pump
Image: Energetic Consulting
The heat pumps appropriate for this type of work are highly efficient, with
Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 3.0 to 6.0, and the energy used by the heat
pumps gets added to the stream of energy moving to the heat user, as shown in
the diagram below. If a data center is using heat pumps with a COP of 5.0,
running on electricity that costs $0.10 per kWh, the energy can be moved up to
higher temperatures for as little as $0.0083 per kWh.
Waste heat could be a source of income for the data center. New York’s Con
Edison produces steam heat at $0.07 per kWh (€0.06 per kWh), and there have
been examples of heat-and-power systems selling waste heat to district heating
systems for €0.1-€0.3 per kWh. For a 1.2MW data centers that sells all of its
waste heat, that could translate into more than $350,000 (€300,000) per year.
That may be as much as 14% of the annual gross rental income from a data center
that size, with very high profit margins.
Closing the Loop
tps: datacenterknowledge,comiprin/146426 48owiosr20r8 How to Reuse Waste Hea rm Dala Cenars inaligntly
There’s also the possibility of combining data centers with power plants for
increased efficiency and reuse of waste heat. Not just in the CHP-data center
sense described by Christian Mueller in this publication in February, or the
purpose-built complex like The Data Centers LLC proposed in Delaware .
Building data centers in close proximity to existing power plants could be
beneficial in several ways. In the US, transmission losses of 8-10% are typical
across the grid. Co-locating data centers right next to power plants would
eliminate this loss and the capital expense of transporting large amounts of
power.
Second, power plants make “dumb” electrons, general-purpose packets of energy
that need to be processed by data centers to turn into “smart” electrons that are
part of someone's Facebook update screen, a weather model graphic output, or
digital music streaming across the internet. Why transport the dumb electrons all
the way to the data center to be converted?
Third, a co-located data center could transfer heat pump-boosted thermal energy
back to the power plant for use in the feed water heater or low-pressure turbine
stages, creating a neat closed-loop system.
There are important carbon footprint benefits in addition to the financial perks.
Using the US national average of 1.23 Ib CO2 per kWh, a 1.2MW data center could
save nearly 6,000 metric tons of CO2 per year by recycling the waste heat.
These applications are starting to appear in small and large projects around the
world. The key is to find an application that needs waste heat year round, use
efficient, high-temperature heat pumps, and find a way to actively convert this
wasted resource into revenue and carbon savings.
About the author: Mark Monroe is president at Energetic Consulting. His past
endeavors include executive director of The Green Grid and CTO of DLB
Ass
design and operations, software development, , professional services, sales,
ciates. His 30 years’ experience in the IT industry includes data center
program management, and outsourcing management. He works on
sustainability advisory boards with the University of Colorado and local
Colorado governments, and is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt.
hitps:luwn.dataconterknowledge,comiprin! 146426 564082018 How to Reuse Waste Hea om Data Centers intelligently
Source URL: https://www-datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/05/10/how-to-reuse-waste-heat-from-data-
centers-intelligently
hitps:luwn.dataconterknowledge,comiprin! 146426 es