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Swedish Data Center Saves $1M a Year Using Seawater For Cooling
alphadogg writes "A data center in Sweden has cut its energy bills by a million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers, though jellyfish are an occasional hazard. Interxion, a collocation company in the Netherlands that rents data center space in 11 countries, uses water pumped from the Baltic Sea to cool the IT equipment at its facilities in Stockholm. The energy used to cool IT equipment is one of the costliest areas of running a data center. Companies have traditionally used big, mechanical chillers, but some are turning to outside air and evaporative techniques as lower-cost alternatives."
That'll shut them down eventually.
how about efficiency?
So...from the article:
So "today" per 1MW of IT load, it would cost $5.4million / 5.5MW or $981818.18 ( 54/55 million $ per MW or 0.981818182 x million $ per MW)
$2.6 million - $0.98 million > $1 million
Now, if he wanted to cool 5.5MW of IT load, it would cost him $14.3 million with the old method vs $5.4 million with the seawater method.
Even if you account for the cost of the third-party...$14.3 million vs $5.4 million is a big difference.
The zebra mussel is a freshwater creature. I'd be surprised if they had large problems with these in their seawater cooling circuit. I guess the salt will get them first.
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
So instead of warming the atmosphere, they're warming the seawater.
Cuts to the chase neatly that. Let's all of us dump our excess heat into the ocean and see how if works out better in the long haul.
No free lunch.
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
All prepared for hosting the Pirate Bay! YARRRRR!
Apparently they could survive in seawater.
It doesn't pump seawater directly through its cooling systems. Instead, the seawater goes to a heat exchanger where it's used to cool fresh water. It has to clean the exchanger fairly regularly, but Coors said it's a simple maintenance job.
The kind of job any bartender will be soon very happy to do for the dole.
But it had to run the chillers only a few hours last year, Coors said, when the government ordered its partner to stop pumping seawater. Coors isn't certain why that was, but he believes it's for environmental reasons. "I think it's to protect the jellyfish," he said.
In Norway:
1. the govt has a partner
2. the jelly fish have govt protection only a few hours each year.
(note: Poe's law suggest a smiley. Here it is: *big-grin* )
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
I hope they hired a marine engineer to work out the anti-fouling issues. The system may work great now, but in a couple months every single surface exposed to seawater will be covered with barnacles and algae. The article mentions cleaning heat exchangers as part of maintenance, but some of this crap can't be scrubbed off without a chisel.
Back when our basement data center housed 70s and 80s era IBM mainframes and their accoutrement (a dozen or so tape drives and a huge 3380 farm) , the building vented cold upstate NY winter air into the DC.
A few years after the final ECL mainframes and 3380s were replaced by "z" mainframes and EMC SANs, the vent was blocked up.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Data Center cooling system to replace trees as main source of clouds.
Bay of Finland is getting warmer everyday because multiple datacenters and nuclear power plants use it to cool down.
Even Google is there doing that goog old no evil: http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/hamina/
I am routinely a bit confused as to why datacenters aren't predominantly located in places with colder climates. Free cooling from the outside during the winter and whatnot. Is there simply a lack of infrastructure to make an ultrahigh-bandwidth line out to...say...northern Montana?
(((dB)))
Use the seawater to cool the servers directly rather than using the seawater to cool the nuclear power plant which generates the electricity to power the cooling. So it's got to be a bit of a win for the environment too right? Improved thermal efficiency is a good thing.
Nice to see a plan which is a win for the environment on top of being a money saver.
This isn't exactly unique or special. Most of downtown Toronto is covered by the cooling grid from one such deep-water lake cooling systems, and I know of at least one datacenter (one of if not the most critical in the country) that uses the service.
The Baltic Sea isn't anywhere near as salty as it sounds. There are so many rivers emptying into it that parts of it, especially in the northern part, are very close to fresh water, and most (if not all) of the fish there are fresh water species. That's why, back in the Viking days, people in that area had to buy salt from mines in what's now Poland, instead of getting it from the sea as most other maritime areas do. This simplifies things tremendously, because they don't have to worry anywhere near as much about corrosion from the salt.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
In March 2009, Google purchased the Summa Mill from Finnish paper company Stora Enso and converted the 60 year old paper mill into a data center.
http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/hamina/
Here is a video about Googles sea water cooling system:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VChOEvKicQQ
Any mechanical engineer worth their salt knows there's been a variety of problems with heat exchangers and seawater for the last century+ and knows to start looking for available solutions.
Apparently they could survive in seawater.
From your linked article:
The Zebra mussel has become a part of the Baltic coastal ecosystem in many areas around the Baltic Sea, but the distribution is patchy, partly depending on the availability of suitable habitats and limited to areas of less saline water.
No, don't use a LTG stirling engine and actually USE that "waste" heat energy to you know........generate useful electrical power or anything. Just vent it to the ocean.......IDIOTS
Stockholm's "sea water" is what most people would describe as brackish - the salt content is much lower than larger bodies of water. While I suspect that the Zebra mussels would still find it too salty to thrive, you might find that individuals can adapt and propagate.
And what is the effect on the local ecosystem of dumping that much heat into the local shallows? Warming oceans are already killing off coral reefs everywhere, and causing algae blooms that decimate local species.
Obviously the impact on the entire ocean is negligible, but in the local dump area the temperature impact is likely to be measurable, significant, and tragic for the local ecosystem.
I'm not using sea-water so maybe this is only tangentially interesting ... The water that comes out of my 10gpm well is at 8C. When I had my new forced-air furnace installed, I asked the installer to put in an evaporator coil to prepare for future air-conditioning... Cost me an extra $180. Later I removed the orifice, hooked up a solenoid valve wired to my furnace. I plumbed well water through the evaporator coil and directed the waste water outside to an outdoor faucet which, in the summer, is hooked up to soaker hoses to water the flower beds... The plants like the warmish water and, while not terribly efficient cooling, it does manage to keep the inside of the house below 22C when outside temps are over 30C... The house has a lot of solar heat load due to big windows with mountain views on the west side and even with awnings up, would get excruciatingly hot without some cooling assistance... My only operating cost is the electricity to pull the water out of the ground
I could probably make better use of the waste water by sprinkling it on the roof before collecting from the eaves and doing drip irrigation on the flower beds, but that will be a project for another year.
(This is in Southern Alberta)
"Swedish Data Center Saves $1M a Year Using Seawater For Cooling"
No. Actually it has "cut its energy bills by a million dollars a year using seawater to cool its servers". The difference is that you need to factor in installation and maintenance costs as well. And I assume them to be very high.
...and wants his water back.
Patrick........!!
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What say I? You are an idiot.
As others have mentioned, this is seawater. But even if it were freshwater, power plants and municipal water supplies draw from rivers and lakes infested with zebra muscles. They are a PITA, but they work around them.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
The college I attend looked into placing a backup data center in the same building as the pool and using the excess heat to heat the pool water which is heated year round anyways. It's an Olympic sized pool, so it could take all the heat those servers could put out.
According to their analysis the cooling system would pay for itself within the first two years, and it has no environmental impact besides saving on heating fuel. They haven't built the backup data center yet, as backups are notoriously hard to justify, but if they do I expect the pool cooling to happen.
I mean, all this heat is just going to vanish into the environment, right?
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