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."

Comments

strange....just $1 million?

[MoFoQ]

So...from the article:

Before Interxion started the project, its energy bills were about $2.6 million a year to cool 1 megawatt of IT load. Today, its energy bill is $5.4 million to cool 5.5 megawatts of IT load, meaning the system has saved it about $1 million a year.

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.

Re:strange....just $1 million?

[shitzu]

Strangest thing is - Sweden is a relatively cold country where people pay for heating. And for hot water in the summertime. Can't all this excess (heat)energy be put to good use instead of dumping it to the sea?

Re:strange....just $1 million?

[mtempsch]

Some [suitably located] data centers, for instance this one, in Sweden do pump heat into the "remote heat" (fjärrvärme) grid, which then goes out to individual homes, apartment buildings etc

Re:strange....just $1 million?

[mikael]

Some rural industrial estates were using their hot air from their cooling systems to grow plants.

One placed I worked in had the external parts of their air conditioning in a ground level sheltered car park. The heat was so incredible, that you could comfortably walk around in this bubble of warm air in a T-shirt or short-sleeve in the middle of Winter. The only was homeless people wandering by and building makeshift tents around one or more of the units in winter, tripping various CPU temperature alarms.

Re:strange....just $1 million?

[petermgreen]

Not easilly.

Computers typically use air cooling, the exhaust temperature of a computer is not very far above the intake temperature and the intake temperature is typically arround normal room temperature or lower. So the exhaust temperature is likely to be barely above normal room temperature making moving the heat arround difficult.

You could raise the intake temperature to the computers but doing so would have significant disadvantages. Firstly it would reduce the ammount of time you had between cooling equipment failure and the temperature rising beyond the maximum safe level for the equipment. Secondly it may cause equipment that isn't designed to work in those temperatures to fail or at least reduce it's life. It would also make things rather uncomforable for people working in the datacenter.

You could also redesign the computers to use liquid cooling, since liquid cooling is far more efficient than air cooling you could run the loop at a significantly higher temperature than typical datacenter air temperatures while keeping the core temperature the same. The downside is of course you'd need to redesign the cooling systems in all your computers and come up with a system for safely adding and removing computers to/from the liquid cooling system.

Re:Heh, they havn't met the Zebra musels from hell

[GumphMaster]

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.

Re:Warm the water directly

[Jherek Carnelian]

Let's all of us dump our excess heat into the ocean and see how if works out better in the long haul.

The article said the warm water is sent to heat pumps to warm up houses in the town. They don't say if they are able to bring the temperature back down to the original levels or not, or even if the water is pumped back into the ocean.

Re:Warm the water directly

[goodmanj]

Read the article: after leaving the data center, the heat is sent to a heat pump where it's used to heat houses.

Using the cold environment isn't terribly new.

[Nutria]

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.

Re:Warm the water directly

[OhANameWhatName]

Read the article

Quit trolling.

This has got to be more efficient

[OhANameWhatName]

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.

Nothing special

[Guspaz]

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.

It's not that salty

[techno-vampire]

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.

So does Google in their datacenter in Finland

[Dtyst]

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

Re:yah

[Sockatume]

If you'd bothered to read the article instead of trying to look like a wise-ass on the basis of ten seconds of reading, you'd know what they do with the waste heat.

Re:Warm the water directly

[Bearhouse]

Most thermal systems, be it in cogeneration/district heating, or even traditional power stations, still end up dumping some residual heat as waste into the environment.
It seems nuts, but it gets to a point where the temperature differential/gradient is simply not enough to justify an industrial process to recover the heat efficiently.
For example, if you were trying to heat your house with water that was only a few degrees above ambient, well, you'd probably not be very happy.

Still, sometimes it works out OK, like the example (in France, from memory), where waste heat from a nuclear reactor is used to heat ponds to grow tropical shrimps, and greenhouses for fruit.

By the time the water finally returns to the river, thermal impact is virtually zero, minimising local ecological disruption.

I cool my cottage similarly ...

[nblender]

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)