DATA CENTRES
The road to recovery
Enlightened companies are always looking to reduce their carbon footprint and one of the ways that many applications, including data centres, can do this is by recovering the heat they use. Tim Mitchell, sales director of Klima-Therm explains.
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any local authorities expect data centre operators to provide heat recovery capabilities in their developments, even though they are not always used, at least initially. A major data centre project that we were involved with in London, for example, had a planning condition that we include a heat recovery capability in the chillers. This is a standard option for us, so it was no problem to include it in the chiller scope of supply.
But the heat recovery pipework loop was taken down into the basement and simply capped off ready for when residential blocks were built, or a heat network was installed nearby; it was not actually required to be used when first installed. The point remains, however, that, in many
26 November 2021 •
www.acr-news.com
situations, it makes sense to make heat recovery available in case/for when it’s needed as a development grows.
This chimes with current government thinking outlined in its industrial strategy. One of its recommendations is that data centres be constructed in close proximity to developments (whether hospitals, leisure centres, homes, or whatever) that consistently require heat. In other words, sharing heat, maybe by plugging into a heat network, becomes the default position. One of the trends with data centres is to go to an all-air-cooling solution, perhaps employing the adiabatic thermodynamic process. Unlike an isothermal process, this happens without transferring heat or mass between the thermodynamic system and its environment.
There is a concept called ‘hot aisle containment’ that allows you to capture and remove warm air and replace it with ‘ambient’ air – perhaps 25 or 30 deg C.
A hot aisle containment system collects the hot exhaust air from the data centre by capturing it from the heat rejection side of the IT equipment within it. The rest of the data centre is effectively then a large, relatively cool air delivery plenum. Containing the hot aisle means that the hot and cold air streams are kept separate. So, for much of the year, you could bring in fresh air to the occupied space and remove warmer air. In short, for most of the year, you could employ free cooling.
But from a planning point of view, I wonder if that notion is set to come under pressure. After
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