The simultaneous increase in data processing, transmission, storage and the climate change targets being imposed at global, national and corporate level are challenging the industry to think of new ways of how we provide power and water to data centers.
Hitting these targets will involve a number of different concepts and technologies and will need to be progressively introduced into both new and existing developments as a roadmap to carbon neutrality.
As data processing and handling becomes denser per rack, and as nearly all the IT processing power is dissipated as heat, the challenges associated with the rejection of heat becomes even more problematic and has led IT equipment manufacturers to look at new solutions due to present design concepts quickly becoming ineffective.
The heat rejected from a data center will be the same whether it uses condenser water, chilled water, or mass air flow as the means of heat rejection. The difference will be in the temperature at which the heat can effectively be harvested to supply to the district heating scheme, and the electrical energy and water consumption required to reject that heat.