Reduced energy and emission for data centers

CLP Power Hong Kong has carried out a study to save about a third of air conditioning energy at data centers and it has the potential to replicate the result for the industry.

With the large amount of data processed, the air conditioning required to cool down data centers make the operation one of the business activities that emits the most.

As such, CLP has identified it as one of the projects to study for energy efficiency improvement using its HK$5-million CLP Community Energy Saving Fund. 

Several hundred thousand dollars have been spent for this project, revealed Anthony Lo Chi-wah, CLP Power director of customer success and sales, and the practice could be replicated to other data centers. He adds that CLP has been conducting analyses with hospitals, shopping malls, and food manufacturing plants and will announce the findings later.

Equinix, which operates five data centers in Hong Kong, reduced about 30% of computer room air conditioning energy consumption by optimizing airflow. It has first designed a system to separate the hot and cold air, then developed a set of procedures to monitor the Cold-Aisle-Containment temperature, which can be tuned by managing the airflow according to the variations of customers’ IT load and distribution.

Leung Wai-lo, Equinix manager of site operations Hong Kong, explained for instance the temperature reaches 23 degrees but the environment could be as high as 27 degrees, that means less cooling energy can be used. After knowing the temperature from the auto-monitoring system, somebody will be sent to tune the cold aisle openings in order to reach an ideal temperature.

Oscar Chan Ka-chung, research assistant professor, Hong Kong Polytechnic University Department of Building Environment and Energy Engineering, said the study was carried out in 24 days in the first two quarters of the year, which should be representative enough. It is estimated that 131,000 kilo-Watt-hours can be saved annually, more or less the same as the consumption of 450 3-person families, and 51,000 kilogram of carbon emission was reduced. There is no effect on the chiller of the building.