ENERGY BORROWING

A New Energy Sequence – One energy source, two uses & reduced CO2

In today’s society there is no doubting it – we need data centers. They are crucial to the way we live, allowing us to connect and use digital technologies, that nowadays we could not live without. However, climate change is a very real issue and along with CO2 emissions one of the biggest challenges facing data centers is energy consumption.

So, imagine a future where some of the world’s largest energy consumers and fastest growing contributors to CO2 emissions, such as these data centers or high performance computing (HPC), Bitcoin or automotive industries, are transformed into clean, green energy borrowers. Now, imagine a future where not only is this possible, but it is accomplished while also improving the performance and profit of the original function of these industries – be that storing, processing, and disseminating data or mining cryptocurrency for example. With Nexalus, this Utopia is not just an aspirational dream for the future, it is the present!

Traditional cooling companies use air to cool data centers, however this medium has reached its limitations. These air-cooling systems cool the chips, but they cannot offer scalable and high performing energy efficient recovery and reuse, and therefore data centers lose huge quantities of waste heat on a daily basis into the atmosphere.

A new scientific approach

This is where Nexalus and our hot-water cooling solutions come to the fore. In order to close the circular economy, the currently wasted thermal energy from data centers needs to be redeployed.

Water has superior thermal properties enabling up to twice the thermal design power of a CPU and the transport of x 4,000 the thermal energy per unit volume as compared with air. At Nexalus we have utilised water cooling to lift over 80% of a data centre’s thermal energy at a water temperature suitable for reuse – between 40°C to 60°C. This means that the historically wasted CPU thermal output can be redeployed in the form of heat to residential, industrial and food production sectors which, in turn, displaces the use of fossil fuels in these areas.

It is for this reason that we view data centers not just as hubs for processing data, but as thermal power stations.

What is so exciting about this new thermal management approach to data center cooling is that yes, it is capturing and redeploying the currently waste thermal energy, but it is also introducing a new energy sequence that will solve the energy crisis

One energy source, two uses & reduced CO2

Data centers who have implemented a Nexalus cooling solution can be viewed as ‘energy borrowers’. Not only does our patented technology reduce the energy use requirement by 30% in data centers, but it also recovers over 80% of this energy and converts it into heat, giving energy a second life as heating for neighbouring industries, growfarms, district heating or for carbon capture units. Data centers are therefore technically only consuming 20% of their energy in.

As per the old energy sequence you still have only one energy source, but now you have two separate uses for this energy and reduced CO2.

It is fantastic to see such an emphasis globally on the generation of green energy at present, be that in the development of new wind farms or solar projects, but the energy demand is still greater than what the grid can accommodate. This energy borrowing solution is therefore key to optimise green energy usage and enable industries like data centers to continue to grow and offer important data processing solutions to consumers, without having a devastating effect on our environment.

At Nexalus we are excited to play our part in enabling data centers globally to create a greener energy future for all.