Google's Chiller-Less Data Center

1sockchuck writes "Google has begun operating a data center in Belgium that has no chillers to support its cooling systems, which will improve energy efficiency but make weather forecasting a larger factor in its network management. With power use climbing, many data centers are using free cooling to reduce their reliance on power-hungry chillers. By foregoing chillers entirely, Google will need to reroute workloads if the weather in Belgium gets too warm. The facility also has its own water treatment plant so it doesn't need to use potable water from a local utility."

Comments

Re:Unreliable...

[j79zlr]

If you have chilled water, you have a chiller, which means you have compressors. Process water or ground source water usually is not cold enough to be an effective cooling medium. You want a high delta T between the entering air temp and the entering water temp to induce heat transfer. Closed loop ground source water is extremely (prohibitively) expensive and open loop is quite a maintenance hassle due to water treatment. High efficiency chillers paired with evaporative cooled water towers with economizer capability is very efficient and reliable. Usually you can get down to around 0.5kW per ton with high efficiency chillers at full load and with multiple staged compressors you can do even better with part load conditions. The cooling towers are usually pretty low with around 0.05 to 0.15kW per ton. Use VFD's on the secondary pumps and cooling tower fans, and you can get cooling in at 0.75kW per ton for the whole plant at peak and even lower and part load conditions (95% of the time).

I just designed a data center for a large Big Ten univeristy and there were no large air handlers involved at all. The system had two 400-ton chillers with the chilled water piped directly to rack mount APC fan coils. Without "green" being the basis of design, the chiller system still operates right at about 1kW/ton.