Techno-Economic Analysis of Waste Heat Utilization in Data Centers: Application of Absorption Chiller Systems

Leyla Amiri,Edris Madadian,Navid Bahrani,Seyed Ali Ghoreishi-Madiseh

doi:10.3390/en14092433

Leyla Amiri, Edris Madadian + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/en14092433

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Abstract

Modern data centers are playing a pivotal role in the global economic situation. Unlike high-quality source of waste heat, it is challenging to recover the decentralized and low-quality waste heat sourced from data centers due to numerous technological and economic hurdles. As such, it is of the utmost importance to explore possible pathways to maximize the energy efficiency of the data centers and to utilize their heat recovery. Absorption chiller systems are a promising technology for the recovery of waste heat at ultra-low temperatures. In fact, the low temperature heat discharged from data centers cannot be retrieved with conventional heat recovery systems. Therefore, the present study investigated feasibility of waste heat recovery from data centers using an absorption chiller system, with the ultimate goal of electrical energy production. To fulfill this objective, a techno-economic assessment of heat recovery using absorption chiller (AC) technique for the data centers with power consumption range of 4.5 to 13.5 MW is performed. The proposed AC system enables saving electricity for the value of 4,340,000 kWh/year and 13,025,000 kWh/year leading to an annual reduction of 3068 and 9208 tons CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, respectively. The results of this study suggest an optimum change in the design of the data center while reducing the payback period for the investors.

Highlights

The incessant growth in the use of conventional fuels and their enormous greenhouse gas emissions necessitate more attention to be brought to environmental awareness
The cooling capacity and the performance of the absorption chiller (AC) systems depend on many parameters such as the heat source temperature, the flow rate, and the cooling water temperature
In the existing energy conversion systems for decentralized source of heat, the majority of primary energy is lost as waste heat

Summary

Introduction

The incessant growth in the use of conventional fuels and their enormous greenhouse gas emissions necessitate more attention to be brought to environmental awareness. Many scholars around the world have been encouraged to spend significant amount of work on innovative technologies to supply heating and cooling demands of urban areas via renewable sources of energy. Owing to the enormous energy consumption resulted from rapidly growing data centers, much attention has been devoted to the possibility of energy recovery from such centers by their authorities as well as energy organizations. (ii) Servers use 38.9% of energy supply, followed by 9.3% and 7.4% of the electricity used by (iii) Communication and (iv). A typical data center produces heat values in the range of 3.2 to 6.4 MW comprising 250 sets of cabinets with 42 to 64 server racks [7]. The new generations of data centers follow a growing trend of heat production with recent ones producing 10–250 kW [8]. In the light of the typical design temperature of 25 ◦ C for a data room, this makes data centers as a year-around stable source of heat, and there exists huge potential for waste heat recovery from data centers

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