Energy-efficient Cooling Systems For Desert Data Centers: Ensuring Reliability And Profit – The cloud is coming back to Earth with a thud. That ethereal place where we store our data, stream our movies, and email the world has a physical presence in the hundreds of giant data centers that are increasingly taking their toll on the planet.

Data centers are the factories of the digital age. These mostly windowless boxes are scattered around the world: from Las Vegas to Bangalore and Des Moines to Reykjavik. They manage the planet’s digital services. Their construction alone costs about $20 billion worldwide.

Energy-efficient Cooling Systems For Desert Data Centers: Ensuring Reliability And Profit

The largest, covering a million square feet or more, consume as much energy as a city of a million people. In total, they consume more than 2 percent of the world’s electricity and emit as much CO2 as the airline industry. And with global data traffic more than doubling every four years, they’re growing fast.

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However, if there is a data center near you, you may not know about it. And you still don’t know which center powers your Netflix download, or whether it runs on renewable energy using Arctic air-cooled processors, or whether it runs on coal and sits in the desert heat, cooled by giant inefficient refrigerators.

We are often told that the world’s economy is dematerializing: physical analog things are being replaced by digital data, and that data has a minimal ecological footprint. But not so fast. If the global IT industry were one country, only China and the United States would contribute more to climate change, according to a Greenpeace report published last year investigating the “race to build a green Internet”.

Google’s data center in Hamina, Finland uses seawater from the Gulf of Finland to cool the buildings, reducing energy consumption. google

Storing, moving, processing and analyzing data all require energy. A lot The processors in the largest data centers hum with as much power as a large power plant can provide 1,000 megawatts or more. And it can take enough energy to keep the servers and surrounding buildings from overheating.

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Almost every keystroke adds to it. Google estimates that a typical search using its services requires as much energy as lighting a 60-watt light bulb for 17 seconds and is typically responsible for 0.2 grams of CO2 emissions. That doesn’t sound like much until you start thinking about how many searches you can do in a year.

And these days, Google is data-lite. Streaming video over the internet is what drives the data bill. IT company Cisco, which tracks these things, estimates that video will make up 82 percent of Internet traffic by 2021, up from 73 percent in 2016.

Two things matter if we are to tame these wild beasts: one is to use renewable energy or other low-carbon energy sources; the other is increasing energy efficiency. On both sides, there is good news to report. Greenpeace says so too. “We’re seeing a significant increase in preference for renewables among some of the Internet’s largest companies,” concluded last year’s report.

More and more IT companies are boasting of their commitment to 100 percent reliance on renewable energy. To meet such commitments, some of the largest are building their own energy campuses. In February, cloud giant Switch, which runs three of the world’s top 10 data centers, announced plans for a solar power center in central Nevada that will be its largest outside of China.

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Data titans often sign contracts to receive dedicated supply from existing wind and solar farms. In the US, this can still be difficult to achieve. The availability of renewable energy is one of the reasons why Google and Microsoft have recently built centers in Finland and Facebook in Denmark and Sweden. Google also signed a deal last year to buy all of the energy from the Netherlands’ largest solar power park to power one of its four data centers in Europe.

Among the main data for consumers, Greenpeace singled out Netflix for criticism. It does not have its own data center. Instead, it uses contractors such as Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud computing company, which Greenpeace says is “almost completely transparent about the energy footprint of its massive operations.” Amazon Web Services objected. A spokesman said

That the company has made a “long-term commitment to 100 percent renewable energy” and has now launched a number of wind and solar farm projects capable of providing about 40 percent of its energy. Netflix did not respond to requests for comment.

Amazon Web Services has some of its largest operations in Northern Virginia, an area across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C., that has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Virginia gets less than 3% of its electricity from renewable sources, plus 33% from nuclear, according to Greenpeace.

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Some industry insiders detect an element of smoke and mirrors in the Internet giants’ green claims. “When most data center companies talk about renewable energy, they’re talking about renewable energy certificates,” Phillip Sandino, vice president of data centers at RagingWire, which has centers in Virginia, California and Texas, recently told an online trade magazine. . In the US and some other countries, renewable energy certificates are awarded to companies that generate renewable energy for a grid, based on the amount generated. The certificates can then be traded and used by buyers to claim that the electricity is from a renewable source, regardless of where the electricity comes from. “In fact,” Sandino said, “the energy that [data centers] buy from electric power is not renewable.”

The global IT industry’s electricity consumption in 2012 compared to the world’s largest energy consuming countries in trillions of kilowatt-hours. Green peace

Others, including Microsoft, help maintain their claims of carbon neutrality through carbon offset projects, such as investing in forests to absorb the CO2 they continually emit.

All of this is important because the differences in carbon emissions between data centers with different energy sources can be huge, says Geoff Fox, head of innovation at DigiPlex, which builds and manages the centers in Scandinavia. Using data collected by Swedish state-owned energy giant Vattenfall, it says that in Norway, where the majority of energy comes from hydroelectricity, generating electricity per kilowatt-hour emits just 3 grams of CO2. In comparison, it is 100 grams in France, 300 grams in California, almost 600 grams in Virginia, more than 800 grams in New Mexico.

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Meanwhile, there is growing concern about the carbon footprint of centers being built in China for Asian internet giants such as Tencent, Baidu and Alibaba; Naver in South Korea; and Tulip Telecom in India. Asia is where the fastest global growth in data traffic is happening. Greenpeace says these corporations have been tight-lipped about their energy performance. But since most of the region’s energy comes from coal-fired power plants, their carbon footprint cannot be large.

Vattenfall estimates carbon emissions at 900 grams per kilowatt-hour in Bangalore, home of Tulip’s giant Indian data center. Even more alarming, the largest hub in the world today is the Range International Information Hub, a cloud data warehouse in Langfang near the northeastern Chinese megacity of Tianjin, where it absorbs more than 1,000 grams of CO2 per kilowatt-hour.

The largest data centers are located in hot or temperate climates, and consume large amounts of energy to keep from overheating.

Just as important as switching data centers to low-carbon energy sources is improving their energy efficiency. A large part of this is due to the energy required to keep the processors cool. Insanely, the world’s largest centers are located in hot or temperate climates, where large amounts of energy are used to keep them from overheating. Of the world’s 10 largest, two are in the heat of the Nevada desert, and others are in Georgia, Virginia and Bangalore.

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Most would drastically reduce their energy requirement if they relocated to a cool climate like Scandinavia or Iceland. One rapidly emerging data center is Iceland, where Verne Global, a London-based company, has established its main operations.

The campus, on the site of an old US Army base, exchanges data using fiber optic cables originally installed for military use. The country is powered by vast sources of hydroelectric and geothermal energy, which were originally developed for aluminum smelting. In Iceland, temperatures hover around zero Celsius for most of the year. “It’s natural cooling here,” said Tate Cantrell, Verne’s chief technology officer, when I visited the complex in 2016. “One of our refrigerators is an open window.”

Verne’s clients include European companies with large data processing needs, such as German car giants BMW and Volkswagen, and companies that perform energy-intensive computing for bitcoin “mining”.

The Verne Global data center in Keflavik, Iceland is powered entirely by renewable energy sources and uses Arctic air to cool the buildings. Fred Rollison/Verne

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Other northern data companies also take advantage of the region’s climate. Norway’s largest bank, DNB, operates its main data center in an underground bunker

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