Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
ERIK TEETZEL: Whenever possible, we recommend people to free cool.
Free cooling means utilizing ambient temperatures outside
of your data center to be able to provide cooling without
operating very heavy energy consuming equipment like chillers.
CHRIS MALONE: We use free cooling at all of our data centers.
And you can see this in our publicly recorded PUE data
where the PUE values go up in the summertime and down in the
wintertime. And this is just a reality of running our
operations with free cooling.
And it yields tremendous efficiency gains. In Europe, we have two data centers that have
no chillers whatsoever.
We're able to take advantage of the local constraints and
conditions. In Belgium, we use evaporative towers without
any chillers given the ambient conditions.
In Finland, we use sea water cooling. Sea water from the Bay of Finland cools the
servers. And then we temper the water returning to
the Bay of Finland so there's no temperature gradience
returning to the bay. Evaporative cooling uses water on site, but
what we found through our studies is that by the use of
evaporative cooling in a very efficient fashion, we save water
on the whole. So for every gallon of water that we use in
the evaporative cooling plants, we eliminate the use of two
gallons of water on the energy production side.
This translates into hundreds of millions of gallons per
year in water savings. There's no one right way to deliver free cooling.
The important point is that you should examine these
opportunities and take advantage of them to eliminate
or reduce substantially the mechanical cooling.