Exploring the Water-Energy Nexus in Data Centres

CUNDALL Consultants Present Best Practices for Sustainable Data Centre Design

As our global economies become more reliant on information and communication technologies, so increases the market for storing and processing digital data. This is demonstrated through high growth rates of data centres worldwide which are inevitably associated with increased power requirements.

To mitigate these increased power needs, efficient all-air optimisation cooling technologies have been gaining interest in the data centre community, namely Direct Air Optimisation (DAO), and Indirect Air Optimisation (IAO). The appeal of these all-air systems is reduced energy consumption. The corollary to reduced energy consumption is the increase of water usage on-site.

The carbon emissions related to the water and power use, along with the embodied energy of water and the embodied water of electricity, are location specific and dependent on the energy mix of each country. Therefore, when a new data centre facility is to be constructed, the special characteristics of the locality should be considered.