What makes a data center green?

Data centers are where the cloud and the internet live, and data centers are the fastest growing sector in the design and construction industry from big tech companies to startups, 5G, to blockchain selfies, to self-driving. The internet is expected to become an even bigger part of our lives. And it's all supported by a growing Legion of mammoth facilities, known as data centers. Our digital footprint grows predominantly every year, and that data passes through stored and processed by the contents of these large energy intensive buildings throughout the world. We will dive into the data center industry, lingo, data center, types, sizes, and standards, the history, the latest news technology efficiencies and what it takes to make a data center green.

Okay, last time we talked about the history of data centers. How do we get here? How do we go from nothing to having the mass production of digital infrastructure and how do we get facilities that are dedicated just to that data, those servers and everything that goes along with that. So we talked a bit about all of that history, as well as some of the standards that go along with that and some of the terminology. So we're covered there. We also talked about disclaimers right at the beginning. So hopefully we're all set and never have to cover that again. So where do we go from here now that we have all of that covered? We can jump into what makes a data center green now, because there's all sorts of different types of sizes of data centers. All of them can get green a different way, and it's not necessarily being about yes or no, whether you're green or not just like the color green itself, it's kind of been used as a label and greenwashing does occur, but just like the color, you can have all sorts of types of green.

And that means that you can have all sorts of different types of shades and flavors. Same goes with data centers.  It doesn't necessarily make it a hundred percent green or not. That's the misnomer. So you have to realize that even though we are talking about green data centers, you can still apply a little bit of solar and try to green it a little bit, or you can have the whole facility a hundred percent covered so that you have a net zero impact for your data center. And we'll discuss some of the ways that you can get there. That there's a lot of renewable resources, such as solar wind, geothermal, hydro, that help power the data centers. And when we're looking at that, those are some of the green power that we're looking for in order to make that data center green.

The materials themselves that go into the data center, the walls, the ceilings, the floors, everything that goes along with that, the copper and the, and the conductors, all the conduits, all the air handlers, everything that goes along with that also has an energy that is required to produce it, make it, ship it and install it. So if you're truly talking about making a data center a hundred percent green, you have to offset all of those components and think about, say like the fans or the servers themselves, that energy to produce that and make that, and have that installed in the server, all those components in the server, and then installed at the site, finally, that all needs to be considered in making that data center a hundred percent green. If you are talking about the greenest of the green data centers.

Now a lot of the times what we're doing is not considering all that sort of latent sort of energy that goes into that, especially for the servers, because oftentimes we can't control that, especially from the design side and they can be swapped out every say two to five years. What we are concerned about is offsetting everything for the data center itself, the facility. So if you have a hundred thousand square foot facility, that's a lot of concrete, a lot of steel that goes along with that. How do we offset all of that energy for the latent energy? And a lot of people won't look at that. So whenever you are talking that deep green or deeper green, that's what we're talking about now for a green data center though, where often meaning what's that energy use to keep it running, let's say operational energy. That is the typical term of what we're looking for a green data center.

All that latent energy and everything else, it's kind of a, I don't want to say brush to the side or glossed over, but it's not as important as that operational energy that we're considering that operational energy is all the energy that is required to power the data center and cool everything. So you have that data center running nice and smoothly. So if you think about the power build that comes in, what is that? Where does that go? How does that happen? How does it get so high? Well, majority of it is going to the IT equipment, but some of it is going to all the other things such as the, the fans that move the air, or you have some cooling systems like a chiller or some other things, other components that are part of that system that requires power also.

And that's all-in-one aspect of looking at just the power itself. But also along with that is the water consumption because sometimes there is, there are water cooled components of the H V a C system, the cooling system that's often used because it can be very efficient to operate that way, but that water use does come with its own sort of cost that goes along with that, that is not necessarily related to the power bill. So it's not just all about that power bill. It's about the water bill and others that are going in that as well.  What I'm getting at is to make a data center green is you must have all those factors considered and pick the ones that apply to you in making your data center greener.  To have a green data center, though, you must realize that there's some tradeoffs that go with that as well.

You must note that some of the most efficient data centers are not the most robust in terms of reliability and availability. They might get rid of redundant components, equipment, and other systems in order to streamline it for better performance in a holistic manner, typically. And additionally, there's other factors that are not considered such as connectivity to existing networks or geographic safety of the region, those kinds of things as well. So oftentimes if you're trying to balance all of that, you might trade off a little bit of that energy performance and that greenness of the data center in order to make sure that your facility can stay running and have better availability and say, you might have a longer term outreach of when that data center might say, pay itself back or go to net zero, as far as energy and water use.

All right, well, how do we take in those factors and sort of start to measure that, and you can start to rate your facility based on its own performance from year to year. And that to me is the ideal thing that you want to do. You don't want to compare necessarily to the guy across the street or the guy across the down the road, or across the country, because oftentimes things are measured a little bit differently from facility to facility. And some of those things can manipulated. I mentioned power usage, effectiveness, PUE, and despite disability to be manipulated. It is still one of the best ways to get a basic understanding for energy use for comparison, and again, a comparison to yourself. So if you know how you're measuring the first year, you're likely to measure it the same way the second year and third year, et cetera, or even month to month or even instant to instant. So in that way, you want to look at how you're greening your data center by incorporating certain things, certain aspects, say again, solar wind directly on the site.

Now it would be remiss mean not to mention other certifications, such as energy star or the us green building council's lead program, which is leadership and energy and environmental design. You can get certifications that way. That definitely help show that the building is actually green. That that data center is absolutely green. And that's complying with the number of things that they put forward. And you have different levels like with lead.  You can have like your basic lead, you can go with silver, gold, or even platinum facility, but each one has progressively harder milestones or harder checks that you must meet. And that can play a role in showing the local community, how environmentally friendly the facility is, whether how it was designed and whether it was constructed and operating that way. And energy star is one of those that says to analyze regularly.

We make sure that you must do it year over year. So energy stars, making sure that you're among the top energy saving or top performers in the class year over year.   If you want to get energy start, you're doing that every single year to get certified. And it's not a major thing. You just need to show that you're measuring and how you're doing, and you send that certification in and you compare to all the others that are in that same category and for energy star, that can be difficult, especially 10 years on you think about your facility and how well it's performing. It might not be performing as well as it was a year ago, or there's other facilities that have newly been built that are performing much better, much more efficiently. And because of that, you're not necessarily meeting that energy star standard that you originally had in the beginning. So it's always constantly improving year over year.

Now there's other certifications and standards that people can be held against. A lot of people reference green piece. They have their click green reports now to understand that energy consumption from end to end, there's a lot of holes in like green peace, in the reports. And it's easy to just kind of rifle through and realize that they're not really understanding the holistic kind of view of how a data center might perform and just like the PUE. It can be manipulated rather easily on those reports. So understanding that, yes, you can go ahead and try to get some of those certifications that might make a lot of noise or have a lot of sway, for say a journalist or the layman, but to really understand that you have to dive in a little bit deeper to make sure that you actually are spending less money and less energy and water on your facility by not necessarily aiming for the milestones or the things that the markers that the, green peace or the PUE might have. But looking at that at a deeper sort of measure in order to make sure that you're servers themselves are operating efficiently, the rooms are operating efficiently. And then of course the facility itself is operating efficiently and that can come down to the equipment selections, just those costs to upgrade. And then also some of those, those resources such as the solar, the wind, where are we getting that? And how is that doing?

So let's talk about a couple examples of some green data centers and how they are aiming to be super green. And a lot of these might not be some of the typical data centers that you might think of. They're not necessarily that warehouse that's sitting outside in a field somewhere they're more specialty built to be greener. And their goal is to be among the greenest data centers in the world.  Let's start with one that I like to refer to is green mountain, in scavenger Norway. And I often use that as a reference to say, Hey, there's a lot of things that are going on here that really make it green. And I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right, scavenger Norway, but basically it's a reuse of an underground NATO facility. So let's start with that, a reuse of a facility.

Fantastic. That's, that's one of the greenest things that you can start with is say, let's reuse something that's already existing, and that can be referred to, again as that brownfield, but as much as we can reuse, we're not rebuilding, that's a path to green as well, just starting out with that facility already being done, but they're operating with a hundred percent renewable power basically because it's all hydro, it's all hydro basically across the entire country of Norway. So, I don't want to say it's cheating, but it's definitely an easy way to get there. And the way that it's cooled is using the nearby ocean water, it's basically the fjords. If you think about Norway, they've got fjords all over the place.  And they basically tapped into that low. And if you think about where Norway is, they always have cool water that can just be circulated through the facility itself to cool the entire thing.

And basically, instead of having to do any cooling, you're just circulating that cold water and using fans to cool the air within the facility itself. So easy wind across the board for them to do that, and then have a hundred percent of it offset for that renewable power. So all those pumps, all those servers and everything else is just using hydro fantastic. It's a great reuse of a facility. And if you have a chance, do look it up green mountain in Norway. Now it's all not all about where that location is to take advantage, say of like the, the hydro that really helps though, but there's some that are out there that they're renovating or retrofitting, and they're making good use of what they've got. And there's a lot of laboratories out there, like the national renewable energy lab in Colorado.

That's another one that does a lot of experimenting and they play with a lot of things so that they can figure out what to do with the energy. And they also play with their servers a lot as well.  There are others in Oak Ridge, in California and, and elsewhere. But I like to say, NREL re is among those that leads the pack. And that NREL means that national renewable energy laboratory in Colorado.  So, if you do look those up, you can see how they're using the liquid cooling with just basically a dozen less than a dozen server racks with liquid cooling. And then they use that waste heat for heating of the buildings and snow melting. And that's a really good reuse. And in having that data center operate in Colorado is one thing, but they don't necessarily have a hundred percent renewable power there, right?

They have a mix of power, which most of the United States does, but they are reusing that waste heat for the buildings that the building that was originally put in, as well as an adjacent building that is connected. And then they've got so much heat left over from basically those that row of racks that they can start to do some snow melting as well. But basically they're just looking to apply all of that waste heat that's coming off the servers. And again, that's all liquid cooling. The servers themselves actually are the, are liquid cooled is not a, it's not a immersion bath or anything like that, which is also an efficient way to, to go. But they're just reusing all that waste heat in order to make sure that they can offset any heating costs. And that's another green way to go. So we're looking for different facilities that are doing that.

And there's several that are looking to offset that. And in Sweden, they're doing that a lot as well. So, there's another one that's in downtown Stockholm, Sweden that basically is just using their waste heat and they use heat pumps to move that waste heat, to send it to their liquid heating systems in a lot of Europe, they use liquid heat in the United States. We use steam a lot for the central heating plants, that you might see in cities such as New York or Washington DC, they'll use steam to power. A lot of those buildings and heat. A lot of those buildings in Europe, it's a lot of liquid, so they don't go to steam. They just use a higher temperature, but don't convert steam. And that means it's very efficient for them to go ahead and convert that using say a heat pump to drag the heat out of the cooling system for the data center and move that heat to that heating system as required.

And that requires a little bit of a bump of temperature. So it's not always crossing over where you can just have a, a heat exchanger that works for you. You need to have a heat pump that can go ahead and bump up that heat a little bit. So you can have the heating that you need. You're hitting the temperatures there, but you're also need to make sure that you can have the cooling temperatures for the data center as well.  Some others that I'll call out, Verne global data center in Fleck, Iceland, this is a hundred percent on geothermal and hydro.  Hydro is big in Iceland as well. A lot of people know about the geothermal, but it's, it's about 30% is run on geothermal. But if you ever go to Iceland, it's, it's beautiful. Number one, but you can count on a lot of geothermal baths and everything there.

So go ahead and take a bath. And one of those geothermal pools but realize that they can operate a lot on that geothermal, but about 70% is runoff of hydroelectricity. The Vern global data center is in Keeve, which is another native facility that's being reused. So it's another reuse facility where they're running on. All that energy that they're using is run on that geo and hydro, but they're also trying to do some outdoor air cooling directly. last I knew with that very global data center; another one is eBay. They're running efficiently in south Jordan, Utah.  They do have lead gold certification. So that's one way to look at it is, oh, okay. They're they went ahead and got that lead gold, as far as like a actual certification and they're running a PUE of, they, they like to boast, it's about 1.04, and it's pretty transparent with what they're doing.

So that PUE isn't always at 1.04, but that's kind of that annualized a little bit ago.  Maybe a couple years old now, but the idea is they're running in Utah and they're running as much outside air as they possibly can to get that PUE as low as they can. There are a few others, General Electric has a couple, that one of them is lead platinum certified with highly efficient electric systems. So, they went ahead and spent the money to get super-efficient systems that they're looking at so that they don't have losses through a lot of transformers and such. And the one I'm referring to is in Louisville, Kentucky.  There's another that's, other world computing, which is lead platinum certified, and that's in Woodstock, Illinois, a hundred percent wind powered, and they have a little bit of geothermal, cooling that can offset.

So, if there's a little bit of a wind power that can used for that geothermal, they do. So they're pretty efficient. There there's a few others. Alibaba in China has been, using lake water cooling, coupled with immersion cooling of the servers, as well as for air cooling. And they use some energy offsets.  LG in Korea has been doing well. They got a Brill award, and the Brill award is, it’s for Kevin Brill. And basically the, the, the Brill award is with seven by 24. And they're using innovative exterior air cooling systems. And that's one of the reasons why they got that award. And they're in Busan Korea where it's not warm, really, if you want to look at the map and they have a lot of advantage for doing that exterior air cooling system. So they've really advanced that pushed that to the edge. And whenever you look at exterior air cooling, sometimes there can be disadvantaged to, to that with say, particulate, that kind of thing. LG is pushing the boundaries there and making sure that they do have filtration and such that the servers don't fail prematurely. But they're doing that to make sure that they take as much advantage of the air-cooling systems as possible.

Lefdal mine data center, that another one in Norway. Again, they have the fueled water cooling and they use that also for their power generation with hydro, but they also have zero CO2 emissions and zero net water usage and the reuse of an existing facility. Again, it's abandoned mine. Check that one out. It's pretty, James Bond kind of cool looking. So that's, Lefdal mine data center. So it's built in a mine in old and abandoned mine. So check that one out as well. There's greenhouse data in Cheyenne, Wyoming, another us one, and their operational practices use that free air cooling a lot. So again, they're one of the ones that are pushing the boundary and they can use that free air cooling up to 80% a year, if not more. So they're trying to get squeeze out every hour of free cooling that they can they go ahead and just pull in that free cooling again in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It's nice. It's dry air. It's nice and cool most of the time. And then they can go ahead and close up for say that last 20% of the year.

Also speaking of that free air cooling, Yahoo's experimented a lot with that. And they've had a passive cooling with, some of their facilities and they've been operating one known as the chicken coop, and they basically have a couple patents on it as well in Niagara New York with just sustained energy and operation over time with a lot of passive cooling that they have now, all these innovations are not just being used for data centers or being used for other facilities, industrial facilities.  If you think about some of the greener buildings say that are along lakes or Lake Ontario, there's a couple data centers that are being used in Toronto Canada, just for that, for that lake water cooling effect, because it's a lot cheaper, a lot easier and way more efficient to use water directly. If you can start to look at some of those different aspects that other green buildings are using and start to apply them to data centers, and that can be scaled up, basically whenever you have a regular say, office building, the size might be similar.

So, you have a hundred thousand square foot office building that's maybe 10 stories high. You might have a data center. That's maybe only two stories high, but still is a hundred thousand square feet, 50,000 square feet of floor. That kind of thing. And what you can start to look at is how is that office space green? How is that being green and how is the, the energy being used? And then what we can start to do is apply that to the data center and realize that the facility itself is going to be a little bit different. It's going to behave differently just because it is a data center. And we're trying to cool that air down, trying to cool those servers down and anything that's supporting those servers in order to make sure that nothing overheats and nothing goes wrong, that you can keep that computing power going.

Now, I mentioned that, but there's some just systems that aren't going to apply to a data center. Even if you start to scale it up, it just doesn't make as much sense. Some of that might be ice storage systems. So if you think about a commercial office building or even a industrial building or something like that, you might think of ice storage and say, oh, you know what? We can just offset when we're using the energy, let's offset it so that we're shaving the peaks or making sure that we're only using during certain periods of time, if it's cheaper for energy or easier for energy, or if we can only generate certain amount of energy at a certain time. Well, we just ramp down during those peak hours so that we're only using that well for a data center that doesn't really work.

You can start to peak shave, but the users are going to get really upset and they're not going to trust your services. And that's one of the things that data centers need to do is they need to have their users. They, they have customers as well. And if you start to limit their ability to go ahead and use compute at certain periods of time or certain peaks, well, that starts to get old fast, and people will go find another facility for green, data center. That can be that can be that sort of balance that you're looking at is, well, we need to go net zero, but we can only hit our peak use say during our peak wind time or peak solar output, those kinds of things, otherwise we're say limited to 50% of the output or even less, well, a lot of data centers won't, won't be able to do that.

And ice storage is one of those. It just doesn't really apply to data centers either. If you think about ice storage and how that applies to, a typical office building that ice storage system releases that ice slowly, and that's not something a data center can really do on top of that, the amount of ice that you'd need to store to support the facility, even for just hours, let alone say a full day of peak load. You're just talking about a huge, huge ice pit. It's just not going to work. It's not going to be as feasible. So there's some systems like that that you really need to pay attention to, and just say, oh yeah, we can do this. We'll offset it this way or that way. And you really need to start to vet some of those systems to make sure that, yes, it's an idea. It doesn't mean it's a great one to be applied to a data center.

Now we talked about some of the top facilities and certain aspects to that. And at the beginning we talked about, okay, what's it make to make a data center green, right. I just want to go back and just sort of say, it's not just necessarily a facility. You also have to look at the companies and what their goals are. Oftentimes the companies are the ones that establish where they're they have that data center that's going and pushing to be green. And there's a lot of companies out there that aren't necessarily the owners of the data center itself, but they might be companies that are helping to make a data center go green.  They can be emerging companies or just an overall facility or the developers or the hyperscale owners. And they might strive to make that data center green or greener than they've already got.

And in that way, they're really pushing for things to go forward. Some of those facilities are aiming to be a hundred percent renewable and everything to be the greenest in the world. And that's great, but you have to realize that a lot of those companies, if you take some of the big it companies out there, they're also aiming for certain green aspects for not just the facilities, but their entire company as a whole. And the facility itself is aiming for that. At the enterprise level, as well as those hyperscalers, they are looking to make those data centers green, and they realize that there's a tradeoff between those costs that go along with that.

So a lot of companies will look at that and say, okay, we've got a normal data center here, but let's make sure that we improve it year over year and that data center and making it green means that you've got a lot of the same features attributes of a normal data center, but you're aiming all the time to have less energy and oftentimes less space. And how do you do that? How do you make sure that you use that less energy or less water and those green data centers often help in just diminishing those costs as well as the energy consumed and water consumed and reduce overall that organization's carbon footprint due to implementation of power systems that are efficient, the servers, the routers, the cooling, the lighting controls, you name it, everything that goes with that is getting to be more efficient and better overall for the entire facility.

Now, a lot of people will say that it's hard to strive to be that green, right. You're talking about, okay, we need to track the facility and how much energy that costs and the steel, the concrete and the operations and, and everything from bookend to bookend. Well, yes, ideally, but a lot of people, a lot of companies don't want to necessarily dive into it that deeply. It doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.  As companies around the world are looking for different ways to integrate different green practices and efficiencies, the data center should be one of those that should be considered looking for innovative ways to help in the business functions and try to focus on that. Whether the data center itself is part of their core business or not, the idea is if you start to green your data center, you're going to see the paybacks usually much faster than say installing something else on an office building.

And you can start to look at that as that holistic company and see bigger impacts with the data center and approving that dollar for dollar over a lot of the other business cases. And of course there's exceptions, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't go after it or try to chase something that would really help that data center efficiency. And one of those is just installing new equipment. If it's 10, 20 years old, you can definitely start to look at what's. That mean if I replace my ups system, are the efficiencies that much better? Oh yeah, absolutely. Go ahead and start to take a look at that. Do just a value engineering cost on just how much money it's going to save. You, let alone the efficiency and you can start to look at it from that aspect to how many dollars are going to go back into your company pocket and what's best for your business.

And that can lead to even more efficient data centers. So you're doing both at the same time. Okay. I think we've covered a lot on making a data center green and we were all over the place right on what it really takes, what it can mean to have a data center be green. So it is a tricky question, right? There's no, yes. Or no answer, especially given the locations, the facilities, any of the energy or power use any of those tricks that might be used to make a data center green or greener.  We’ll cover more next time on say typical data center, energy use, and PE, and some of those hit falls, maybe, talk a little bit more about what's happening in industry.

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