At the corner of Sixth
Ave and Bell St in downtown Seattle, Washington (USA) sits a parking lot. That parking lot is within a reasonable
distance of a newly built Amazon data centre as well as numerous high-rise
office buildings and ongoing development projects. If a company known as Clise Properties has
its way, the lot will become a 12-story data centre with a state-of-the-art system
that recycles waste heat and sends it to nearby office buildings.
Clise Properties and
Graphite Design Group propose to design and build a new data centre with a
completion date of early 2017. They have
already submitted initial plans to the local Planning Award for review. The key to getting the approval they need is
their waste heat recycling system. It is
a system that Clise has already successfully implemented for Amazon as part of
the Westin building development.
The new data centre will
devote the first two floors to UPS and power and cooling needs. The remaining eight floors will be data
centre space at about 11,000 ft.² per floor.
The space is likely to be used by everything from individual hosting companies
to enterprise clients leasing dedicated equipment.
As you know, a data
centre of this size will generate tremendous amounts of heat. Temperatures in the region of 38°C are not
unusual for the air coming off cooling fans however, rather than allowing this
heat to be wasted through the venting though, Clise plans to use an extensive
duct system to send it to nearby office buildings that are part of the same
development complex. This will enable
the other buildings to keep tenants warm while still reducing energy bills.
What Clise is doing in
Seattle is not unique to them; other projects designed to recycle waste heat
have been undertaken by Telecity (France), Telehouse (UK) and IBM (Switzerland)
to name just a few. Recycling waste heat
is an extremely simple and efficient way to reduce energy costs by harnessing
something that would otherwise be vented into the air.
Onward and Upward
It seems unlikely that
the city of Seattle would reject the plans submitted by Clise and Graphite
barring some exceptional circumstance no one is aware of yet. The plan to build a state-of-the-art data
centre in one of America's most tech savvy cities has many obvious
advantages. Being able to recycle waste
heat for the purposes of space heating is an added bonus that should effectively
secure development approval.
It would be nice to see
this sort of data centre facility become the de facto standard all over the
world and that may very well happen. As
the world looks for ways to be more energy efficient and cost-effective it just
does not make sense to continue wasting the heat generated by server
farms. It is essentially free heat just
waiting to be harnessed for other purposes.
To not take advantage of it is akin to throwing a lot of money away.
Source: Data Centre Knowledge – http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/10/21/new-12-story-project-to-recycle-data-center-waste-heat/
No comments:
Post a comment