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8: What About Chillers, Cooling Tower Fans, and
All That Cooling Equipment Usually Ignored by IT? 131

you’re already a step ahead of most data centers. Most data center facilities
have meters that give the usage for the whole building.

Starting with the Data Center Cooling Basics

Saving energy for the data center cooling system and building lighting
systems should start with the basics. Whenever electrical power is consumed
in an Information Technology (IT) room or data center, heat is generated that
needs to be removed from the space. Data center and IT room heat removal is
one of the most essential, yet least understood, of all critical IT environment
processes. Improper or inadequate cooling significantly detracts from the life
span and availability of IT equipment. A general understanding of the funda-
mental principles of air conditioning and the basic arrangement of precision
cooling systems facilitates more precise communication among IT and
cooling professionals when specifying, operating, or maintaining a cooling
solution.
The case studies in Chapter 9, “Green IT Case Studies for Energy
Utilities,” Chapter 10, “Green IT Case Studies for Universities and a Large ptg
Company,” and Chapter 11, “Worldwide Green IT Case Studies,” indicate
some of the basic ways to save energy:

■ For one data center, there are 10 chillers, and chillers are powered down
when not needed (for example, when outside air in the winter is used for
cooling). In the winter, typically at least half the chillers are powered
down. This is a basic change in operations that can give an almost imme-
diate payback.
■ An energy-savings project to install variable frequency drives for the
blowers on the chillers resulted in a 12-month payback.
■ Putting the data center lights on motion detectors resulted in a 3-month
payback.

New and innovative cooling solutions available would be especially valu-
able for new data center construction. This chapter discusses methods being
developed to store energy including stored cooling.
The use of fuel cells to provide electricity for data centers is receiving a
great amount of research attention. Details of this technology, as well as rec-
ommendations, will be given in this chapter.