INTELLIGENT
GREEN TECHNOLOGY
HPE and Danfoss partner to reuse excess heat from data centre energy consumption
H ewlett Packard Enterprise , HPE and Danfoss announced their collaboration to deliver HPE IT Sustainability Services , Data Centre Heat Recovery , an off-the shelf heat recovery module , helping organisations manage and value excess heat as they transition towards more sustainable IT facilities .
The rapid integration of AI technologies across organisations and businesses is expected to have a dramatic increase in the power demand and utilisation of AI optimised IT infrastructure . According to the International Energy Agency , by 2026 the AI industry is expected to have grown exponentially to consume at least ten times its electricity demand in 2023 .
To mitigate these challenges , IT leaders and data centre facility operators are taking action to reduce energy usage , such as implementing modern power-efficient capabilities and improved cooling systems . Excess heat in the EU alone represents an estimated 2,860 TWh per year , almost equal to the EU ’ s total energy demand for heat and hot water in residential and service sector buildings .
The flow of excess heat from data centres is uninterruptible and therefore constitutes a very reliable source of clean energy .
HPE ’ s scalable Modular Data Centre , MDC , in the form of small footprint , high-density , kW , rack containers , can be deployed nearly anywhere in the total absence of heavy industry and incorporates technologies such as direct liquid cooling , reducing overall energy consumption by 20 %.
Danfoss ’ solutions , including heat reuse modules that capture excess heat from data centres to provide renewable heating onsite and to neighbouring buildings and industries for various applications , and Turbocor oil-free compressors that enhance data centre cooling efficiency by up to 30 %.
HPE ’ s MDC incorporates direct liquid cooling , DLC technologies to enhance energy efficiency by over 20 % and optimise energy production and distribution , to notable energy savings . The design ’ s compactness minimizes energy loss by reducing the distance for energy and cooling fluid transport and maximizes the temperature differential at the inlet and outlet , which promotes the capture of excess heat .
Furthermore , the MDC ’ s agility and the exclusion of heavy industrial materials negate the need for costly , conventional building materials and substantially reduces the time to market . Deployment can be achieved three times quicker than with traditional data centres , decreasing from 18 months to as few as 6 months .
The reduced land footprint and flexibility of the MDCs allow for placement in proximity to data generation sites , which diminishes the energy impact and bottlenecks associated with complex networking solutions and data transfer , while also supporting enhanced data governance and security .
HPE ’ s modular data centres offer an impressive power usage effectiveness , PUE of 1.1 in contrast to the PUE of 1.3 to 1.4 typically associated with the best modern designs of traditional brick-andmortar data centres .
Capable of handling the most power-demanding architectures like HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000 , HPE ’ s modular data centre is the adequate architecture for mission critical and compute intensive workloads like supercomputing and generative AI , enabling scientists , universities , and enterprises to achieve faster outcomes . •
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS 53 53