Abstract
The Office of the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission has reported that, from 2014 to 2018, Thailand’s internet usage has grown six-fold to 3.3 million terabytes per annum. This market trend highlights one of the policies of Thailand 4.0, with the aim of making Thailand a hub for information transfer in ASEAN. As a result, there will be a massive demand growth for data storage facilities in the near future. Data centres are regarded as the brain and heart of the digital industry and are essential for facilitating businesses in organising, processing, storing and disseminating large amounts of data. As the energy demand for equipment cooling contributes to over 37% of the total energy consumption, the data centres of the world’s leading companies, such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook, are generally located in cold climate zones, such as Iceland, in order to reduce operating costs for cooling. Due to this reason, the possibility of data centres in Thailand is limited. Beneficially, PTTLNG, as the first liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in Thailand, has processed the import, receiving, storage and regasification of LNG. The high abundance of cold energy inherently presented in LNG is normally lost to the surroundings during regasification. Presently, PTTLNG’s LNG receiving terminal utilises a heat exchanger with propane as an intermediate fluid to transfer cold energy from LNG to water. This cold energy, in the form of cold water, is then used in several projects within the LNG receiving terminal: (1) production of electricity via an organic Rankine cycle capacity of 5 MWh; (2) cooling the air inlet of gas turbine generators to increase the generator efficiency; (3) replacing refrigerant heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems within buildings; (4) development of winter plantations with precision agriculture to replace imported products. Therefore, this study focuses on the potential and future use for LNG cold energy by performing a thermodynamic and economic analysis of the use of LNG cold energy as a source to produce cold water at 7 °C, with the total cold energy of 27.77 to 34.15 MW or 7934 t to 9757 t of refrigeration depending on the target pressure of the natural gas to replace the conventional cooling system of data centres. This research has the potential to reduce the cooling operation costs of data centres by more than USD 9.87 million per annum as well as CO2 emissions by 34,772 t per annum. In an economic study, this research could lead to a payback period of 7 years with IRR 13% for the LNG receiving terminal and a payback period of 2.21 years with IRR 45% for digital companies.
Highlights
The world has undergone a shift from the industrial revolution era to the digital era.In 2020, mobile phones began to support the 5G platform, marking the advancement of the digital industry through information communication, the internet of things (IoT), smart cities, cloud services, big data analytics, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars [1].Data centres are the heart and brain of the digital industry and are pivotal to data and information collection
Cold energy utilisation can be evaluated by the “exergy efficiency”, “Exergy is considered one of the indicators representing how efficientl which is defined as the potential or maximum amount of useful work of a system and an (4): cold energy utilisation is transferred to a target user, as in Equations (3)isand effective tool for evaluating the amount of energy that is lost in the system [28,29]
Exergy of liquified natural gas (LNG) cold energy consumed at the facility i, as presen by the Targeted User at the facility i, ∆Ei LNG is the amount of Exergy of
Summary
The world has undergone a shift from the industrial revolution era to the digital era. In 2018, the power consumption of data centres amounted to ~200 TWh [2], i.e., ~3.0% of all electricity usage in the world. The energy consumption of air conditioning has a significant impact on the average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of global data centres. This index is normally ~2.00 [9]. The free cooling from LNG cold utilisation of the district cooling systems in European Union countries has the potential to reduce electricity consumption by ~60% compared to standard air conditioning systems for residential buildings [24]. It was estimated that the cold energy from LNG during regasification processes was ~47,214 and 88,383 kWh at RGTPJ and RGTSU, respectively. This research has the potential to reduce the cooling costs and CO2 emissions of data centres
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