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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."
If it wasn't for the required internet connectivity google could go off the grid completely. But they already own so much fibre and the public internet seems to need google more than they need it.
Soon they will generate all their own power from wind and solar, convert all their employees shit to power so they don't need the sewerage system either, send all their traffic through the network of low earth orbit satellites they are about to launch which also conveniently beam solar power back down to them.
So basically at the end of the day they will be able to buy or swindle a plot of land from some country with low tax, bring in all their own employees, contribute absolutely nothing to the local economy and leave when the sun goes down. It's great really, saves them on lawyers that would otherwise help them pussyfoot through the swaths of modern over-regulation and the satellites will help them get past any censorship / connectivity problems.
And if China start shooting down their satellites, Google will make satellites that shoot back
So basically everything gets rerouted on a hot day. Ok, that sounds fine until you realize that most of the outages of Google's products were due to, rerouting. And also, it seems odd that the cost of building a (hopefully redundant) datacenter that is this unreliable would be less than consolidating it with another one and using electrical cooling.
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Is it really worth to be dependent on the weather in exchange for a lower energy bill?
Why not just reroute the weather? Once google gets into cloud seeding and all that they really will be SkyNet.
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Remember that even on hot days not all of the traffic through the datacenter needs to be rerouted, and I'd imagine that a location selected for a datacenter like this was chosen for the infrequency of days that will require rerouting. Do you know how much it costs to cool a datacenter, and how much this will save? I don't, but Google probably does, and they probably wouldn't make a decision to do something like this without comparing the savings with the potential cost from decreased lifespan of computers running hot and losses due to downtime. I would also imagine that Google will be working to greatly increase stability during rerouting, given the comments from the end of TFA about other power saving uses, such as routing traffic to datacenters where it's night, meaning "free cooling" can be used since it's colder outside, and off-peak electricity rates are in effect.
I think the concept is interesting, and it makes me wonder if we'll see more datacenters built in areas of the world more conducive to projects like this in the future.
I have to back this up. TFA says the maximum temperature in Brussels is 66 to 71 degrees. I recall it being warmer than that during the summer I lived there. I can't quite remember the temperature, but 24 or 25 C (which is in the mid to upper 70s F) comes to mind.
I don't know about natural lakes but man made ponds have been used for just that purpose.
The ancient Persians had a passively cooled refrigerator called the yakhchal which "often contained a system of windcatchers that could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels in summer days."
Perhaps the Google datacenter could employ some variation of their technique.
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They do! Well... not Superior, but Lake Ontario.
Toronto has a rather large system that uses deep, cool water as a heat sink.
Enwave is the company that provides this service.
52 52'23" W 47 32'07" N
They already do that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_lake_water_cooling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_heating
So the fundamental upshot is that the point to point speed of the internet will be directly correlated to the average temperature of various cells, on a large scale. The statistical effect will be there. I'd wager this will be a remarkably accurate and near real-time barometer of global temperature.
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It's good to read some good news for a change...but it wont hit too many headlines..."Giant Googlebillion-dollar Company Doing Something Good" This "good" I speak of is someone with means and vision getting out there and just doing something. I still think Google could easily turn to the darkside...but is a whole different post ;)
The short answer is yes --- water takes a staggering amount of energy to change temperature (it's one of the many properties the stuff's got that's really weird). A big lake makes an ideal dumping ground for waste heat. What's more, the environmental impact is going to be minimal: even the biggest data centre isn't going to produce enough waste energy to have much effect.
(A big data center consumes about 5MW of power. The specific heat capacity of water is about 4kJ/kg.K, which means that it takes 4kJ to raise the temperature on one kilogram of water by one kelvin. Assuming all that gets dumped into the lake as heat, that means you're raising the temperature of about 1000 litres per second by one kelvin. A small lake, say 1km x 1km x 10m, contains 10000000000 litres! So you're going to need to run your data centre for ten million seconds, or about 110 days, to raise the temperature by one measly degree. And that's ignoring the cooling off the surface, which would vastly overpower any amount of heat you could put into it.)
(The same applies in reverse. You can extract practically unlimited amounts of heat from water. Got running water in your property? Go look into heat pumps.)
In fact, if you were dumping waste heat into a lake, it would make sense to try and concentrate the heat to produce hotspots. You would then use this for things like fish farming. Warm water's always useful.
I don't know about natural lakes but man made ponds have been used for just that purpose.
Man made ponds are used because the EPA crawls up your ass if you want to use a natural body of water for any commercial/industrial output.
Note: I'm saying that's a bad thing. I'm glad the "good old days," when chemicals, raw sewage, and cooling water were dumped willy nilly into the waterways and drinking supply, are gone. You warm up an area of water 10 or 15 degrees farenheit and you'll kill most everything living in it but algae.
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At those latitudes the ambient subterranean temperature remains pretty ambient all year long. Drill into the side of a mountain or hill with a boring tool, leave the edges rough (with a smooth poured/paved floor for access) and just drop your server containers in there with power coming in. If you go all the way through the hill you can use the natural air currents to push/pull air through the tunnels, and the natural heat absorption qualities of stone will keep the temperature down. I'd be surprised if any active "cooling" were needed at all.
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Cornell University actually did this exact thing to cool a good chunk of the campus. It's called lake source cooling. While there will of course be some environmental impact, the energy usage is 20% of normal chillers and thus is, I'm sure, an environmental net gain.
That is where the ice storage systems become interesting and cost effective. In the states, usually half of a commercial energy bill is peak demand. If you can transfer that energy usage to night time to build up your ice storage and transfer your main power draw to off peak the savings can be very significant and create payback times in months not years.
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I wonder how much this is a cynical marketing and public policy exercise. A few months ago, the European Commission announced an ambitous programme to the IT industry for European energy conservation targets to be met by 2012 and lo and behold, look who's here preening its feathers?