ENERGY SAVING
The Cold War A
recent article in the Independent asked: “How bad is email for the environment?” This was following the French energy regulator RTE’s
call for companies to reduce e-mail use in order to save energy.
The article talked about the physical infrastructure that supports e-mail communication and the energy it uses. This, indirectly, has once again put the spotlight on industries like air conditioning that play a large role in supporting the planet’s hunger for data. Data centres currently account for about 2% of global electricity demand – a percentage which is expected to rise to as much as 8% of the global total by 2030, according to a study by Anders Andrae, a researcher for sustainable information and communications technology at Huawei Technologies. HVAC in data centres accounted for approximately 171,000 gigawatt hours of electricity consumption worldwide during 2017. This is the equivalent electricity consumption of 45 million UK houses - and there are currently only approximately 25 million homes in the UK.
This huge consumption of energy is increasing year
on year and HVAC use is on the rise - cooling now accounts for approximately 40% of the electricity consumption in conventional data centres and at least 65% of office spaces and 30% of retail spaces now have air conditioning. It is estimated that cooling in offices typically uses around 40kWh/m2 per year. According to an article in CIBSE Journal from 2016, a tenth of UK electricity consumption is used for air-conditioning. What is clear is that RTE, in trying to reduce e-mail usage in order to lessen the strain on energy infrastructure, is barking up the wrong tree. The world will continue to produce and consume data at unprecedented levels and the global deployment of air conditioning will continue to increase. Considering these statistics and global trends, it is clear that we need to do something. The answer, in my opinion, actually lies in the problem - data. Data is being produced at unprecedented rates. The
Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to have 30 billion devices and things connected to it by 2020 and we are making vast strides forward in IoT and software. The
26 January 2020
Rick Nicholls of Airedale explores how data is leading the fightback for an industry under pressure.
growth of the IoT has seen the total market for Smart Connected HVAC in Europe reach 200 million Euros in 2018 and is expected to more than double by 2023 with estimates of 415 million Euros. We can actually glean data from HVAC equipment quite easily. Sensor technology has advanced massively in recent years and we can measure temperatures, humidity, pressure, energy use, valve positions, rpm, vibration and more. The IoT is certainly a buzz term at the moment, which is fine. It’s great that technology is progressing to a point where the connected systems can provide data and an insight to system performance. However, data on its own is quite useless. It is ones and zeros, readouts, numbers and words. Analytics can advertise areas for improvement, but is it happening? Is connectivity included to satisfy a spec or to provide alarm monitoring and the ability to change a setpoint? In my experience the potential of a lot of “connected” HVAC systems is not being fully exploited. The key to optimisation using data lies in what +you do with it, which can be explained using the following model: Data can be analysed to become information.
Information can be communicated to provide insight. Insights can be acted upon. This is where HVAC knowledge and system design comes into play. Using data centres as an example, most facilities are cooled to ASHRAE recommended standards. The cooling medium will typically be a close control or precision AC unit, Fan Wall or Computer Room Air Conditioner (CRAC). This will either be Direct Expansion (DX), chilled water or in some instances a combination of both. It is clear from manufacturer recommendations that the server equipment can operate to much higher temperatures and in recent years some modern data centre service level agreements have been adjusted to suit this.
To achieve a fixed temperature at the server, especially where this temperature is quite close to the manufacturer’s maximum allowed envelope, typically the system architecture relies on sensors local to the cooling equipment to provide the desired temperature
www.acr-news.com
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