Liquid-Cooled Server Technology that Dramatically Reduces Electricity in Building-Connected Data Centers and Enables 95% Waste Heat Reuse
Today data centers in the U.S consume about 70 TWh of electricity annually. What if there was an easy way to reduce this electricity use by up to 35%? Even better, what if data centers were located in ordinary buildings without the need for expensive air conditioning and air handing systems? Better still, what if the heat energy produced by the data center's servers could be easily recovered and reused for building heating? This presentation will provide an overview of a unique and innovative form of liquid immersion cooling for data center servers developed by LiquidCool Solutions that can be easily deployed to achieve the benefits described above. As validation of the benefits, the presentation will describe testing of a small-scale version of this immersion cooling system conducted at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Testing demonstrated that the system was able to recover 90% to 95% of server heat energy at a temperature high enough for use by conventional building heating systems while eliminating internal server fans and using just 1% of the server power to circulate cooling fluid through the system. The concluding section of the presentation will focus on development of a roadmap for scaling-up and commercializing this innovative cooling technology. This will include proposals for how specific commercial building types could make effective use of this technology to recover and reuse server waste heat and a strategy for overcoming barriers to adoption of such a new and innovative technology.
- Research Organization:
- National Renewable Energy Lab. (NREL), Golden, CO (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- Wells Fargo Foundation, Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN2)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC36-08GO28308
- OSTI ID:
- 1524309
- Report Number(s):
- NREL/CP-5500-70945
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: Presented at the 2018 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings, 12-17 August 2018, Pacific Grove, California
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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