Investigation of an energy efficient means to provide electrical and cooling services to a data centre park

Abstract

The Singapore government had plans to attract foreign companies to establish their Data Centre (DC) here, to strengthen Singapore’s position as an economic and infocomm hub. This raised concerns about designing energy efficient means to provide electrical and cooling services to a Data Centre Park (DCP). This project used TRNSYS simulation software to investigate methods to provide the above-mentioned services more efficiently. The developed trigeneration cooling system had shown to reduce energy consumption by at least 2% compared with the conventional cooling system. This verifies the feasibility of using trigeneration to improve energy efficiency.

A dynamic controller was also used in the trigeneration system to control the set point temperature inside the simulated DC. It was shown that the increment of set-point temperature by 1°C in the range between 18°C to 25°C can cause a maximum of 8.4% reduction in the DC’s Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) value. The associated cost savings were also calculated and presented. Additionally, the variations of PUE values every month for one year were also examined. The results proved to be very useful in determining the peak power demand of the DC.

Analysis of the different transmission efficiencies of the waste heat to the absorption chiller for trigeneration was performed. The results show the relationship between the amounts of energy saving with their respective transmission efficiency improvements. This provides a yardstick for the incentives achievable for using a more energy efficient system.

In all, the techniques developed for creating the robust simulated system in this work, are found to be invaluable design tools for providing cooling and electrical services to the DCP. It also serves as a foundation for more efforts to achieve a greener DCP.