Optimizing Data Center Waste Heat Reuse: Case Studies and Environmental Implications

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6463-455-6_8How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Data center; Power consumption; Waste heat reuse; Simulation; Case studies

Abstract

As data centers (DCs) are the backbones of information and communications technology (ICT), internet and big data, the utilization of energy by DCs has increased exponentially, which presents a significant impact on the environment. To simultaneously solve the dilemma of DC huge amount of electricity used for cooling on the one hand and a large amount of waste heat that is converted from nearly all the consumed electricity on the other hand, better use of low-grade waste heat from DCs represents a significant source of energy savings for both future fourth generation of district heating (DH) networks and reducing environmental impact. This study presents an innovative waste heat reuse approach and develops a generalizable methodology that employs a simple dynamic estimate of the potential for reutilising DC waste heat in the heat demand in DH for buildings. Brief economic calculations for building operators are also provided. The proposed modeling method is a two-stage approach for calibration and validation based on two real DCs in Finland. After validation, the model is then applied for investigating the potential environmental impacts of a real DC in its design phase. The analysis demonstrates that reusing waste heat from an 18 MW data center to heat 400,000 m² greenhouse and buildings results in a substantial reduction of 603,366 tons of carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions over a 25-year period. From the building owners’ perspective, the payback time is remarkably short, spanning only five years. The results highlight the feasibility and effectiveness of the DC waste heat recovery to tackle the energy and environmental problems.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiaoshu Lü
AU  - Tao Lu
AU  - Qunli Zhang
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/07/11
TI  - Optimizing Data Center Waste Heat Reuse: Case Studies and Environmental Implications
BT  - Proceedings of the International Renewable Energy Storage and Systems Conference (IRES 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 65
EP  - 71
SN  - 2589-4943
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6463-455-6_8
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6463-455-6_8
ID  - Lü2024
ER  -