18 minute read
Modular Approach Curbs Data Center Energy Use
from commARCH - June 2017
by IdeaSoil
The Alchemist Brewery owners wanted a space that was as efficient as it was alluring. Trane HVAC systems helped deliver the result.
Inset. A Trane Performance Climate Changer air handler with a CDQ (Cool, Dry, Quiet) wheel handles dehumidification and space cooling demands.
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Humidity-Control HVAC For IPA Brew Design/build and control system supports brewing process.
“ W hen people walk in the door, their jaws drop,” said John Kimmich, co-owner and head brewer at The Alchemist Brewery. “The natural light, the energy efficiency of the building—it’s a church to beer.”
The original Alchemist location opened in Waterbury, VT, in 2003. After eight years of success, co-owners John and Jen Kimmich decided to open a second location in Stowe, VT, to help meet their growing production needs. The second location of The Alchemist Brewery was built with a vision of breaking from fluorescent-lit monotony to create a beautiful, inviting space for beer enthusiasts to come together, relax, and enjoy the brewery’s nationally respected Heady Topper IPA.
When Kimmich set out to build the brewery’s Stowe facility, he was determined to create a space that was as efficient as it was alluring. “We wanted to make use of the natural light, while considering the environmental responsibility of the brewery,” he said. Kimmich recognized the impact of the beer-brewing process itself and the number of wash-down and boiling procedures involved. The brewing process often creates a humid environment, so humidity control was billed as a top priority as construction on the second Alchemist facility began to take shape.
It was critical to control humidity for the space and keep the process equipment and floors as dry as possible to avoid the possibility of patrons slipping and falling in the tasting room. Of course, creating a comfortable environment was also top of mind, with the brewery hoping to maintain a 74 F indoor temperature and proper ventilation in the open floor plan.
The town of Stowe also had odor-control and waste-handling requirements for the brewery to abide by, which influenced the construction plans. “We wanted to keep our environmental responsibility in mind, to create
the kind of place where you want to be from everyone’s point of view,” said Kimmich.
The brewery’s construction manager brought the VHV Co., Winooski, VT, in as their design/build contractor based on the company’s knowledge of the brewery process and experience with brewery applications. With a trusted relationship that spans more than 17 years, VHV contacted Trane, Davidson, NC, to discuss project challenges and the best mix of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) equipment and controls to support the operation.
IMPROVING EFFICIENCY An 80-ton, high-efficiency, air-cooled Trane CGAM scroll chiller was selected to meet the facility’s needs. Featuring onboard pumps with variable-frequency drive, the chiller reduces energy use and creates a comfortable environment for employees and visitors. With a limited
building footprint, the chiller was installed outside to allow more useable interior space for the brewery equipment and operation. Staying cognizant of the owner’s environmental concerns, a free-cooling unit was also installed, allowing the scroll chiller to remain idle when low outdoor temperatures enable the free cooler to take on the full load. This greatly reduces energy use and helps meet sustainability requirements.
Twenty-four feet above the production floor, the VHV team installed a Trane Performance Climate Changer air handler with a CDQ (Cool, Dry, Quiet) wheel to handle dehumidification and space cooling demands. Rather than lifting the entire air handler to put it in place, the modular unit was raised to the platform in eight sections where it was assembled.
After cooling and initial moisture removal in the cooling coil, supply air flows through the CDQ desiccant wheel, which attracts and holds water vapor from the saturated air. The wheel rotates slowly into the upper air path where moisture is released into the lower relative-humidity airstream. The moisture is then removed through the cooling coil, and the process repeats.
With the wheel in series with the airflow, the CDQ system improves the dehumidification capacity of standard cooling equipment from 20% to 300%, allowing a 5- to 15-deg.-lower dew point. The CDQ system limits the amount of outdoor air required, eliminating the need for expensive charcoal filters to control odors. The system easily helps to resolve The Alchemist’s humidity concerns, while keeping costs low. CONTROLLING SYSTEM OPERATIONS To enable the desired sequencing and effective equipment interface, a Trane Tracer SC building-automation system (BAS) was installed to maintain space conditions. With the web-based Tracer SC, facility staff at the brewery can access systems remotely from their smartphone or tablet to ensure temperature and humidity levels are as desired, check airfl ow rates, adjust setpoints, troubleshoot issues, or conduct daily tasks.
“It is really cool to be able to monitor the building and turn things down at night,” said Kimmich. “We don’t have to worry that things run and run and run just because we forgot to go in that room and check it that night. You can log in to your computer and see everything you need to, and make adjustments right there.”
C ustom graphics on the Tracer SC provide a pictorial representation of the building systems. With a click of the mouse, brewery staff uses the system to complete a building check, make overrides, change screens from one floor plan to another, and interface with specific pieces of equipment. They can also choose to look at data logs and trends to monitor system performance over time.
To accommodate the expansive floor plan, a Trane Air-Fi wireless system was used to connect the system controllers, unit controllers, air handlers, VAV boxes, fan coils, and zone sensors, eliminating the time and expense of running conduit wire, and preserving building aesthetics.
Working together, VHV and Trane delivered a complete design/build equipment and controls solution for The Alchemist Brewery’s Stowe facility, meeting the owners’ specific humidity, comfort, and efficiency requirements. “Working with VHV and Trane enabled us to do this project in a way that suited our needs and timelines,” said Kimmich. “The result is a new facility that lives up to our standards; the high standards that have gotten us to where we are today.” With the facility’s environment taken care of, Kimmich and his team can get back to what they’re best
An Air-Fi wireless system connects the system controllers, unit controllers, air handlers, VAV boxes, fan coils, and zone sensors, eliminating the time and expense of running conduit wire, and preserving building aesthetics.
at—“turning matter into gold, that’s what we do.” CA
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Modular Approach Curbs Data Center Energy Use
Using small modular cooling blocks that can be scaled to actual IT use results in 90% energy effi ciency.
Data centers are a lynchpin of our modern economy. Keeping up with the explosive growth of digital content, big data, e-commerce, and Internet traffi c is making these facilities one of the fastest growing consumers of electricity in developed countries.
Data-center power consumption is on the rise, increasing 56% worldwide and 36% in the United States from 2005 to 2013. In fact, data centers use nearly 2% of the world’s supply of electricity at any given time, and 37% of that amount is used to keep computing equipment cool. Not only is this a drain on the power grid, but it also taxes water supplies. A 15-MW data center can use as much as 360,000 gal. of water/day—that’s more than half the water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
ENERGY SOLUTIONS Aligned Energy, Danbury, CT, an integrated technology platform, has developed a solution that eliminates infrastructure complexity and waste, heightens visibility and control, and improves reliability in data centers. One of Aligned Energy’s subsidiary companies, Inertech, set out to address the key drivers of cost in data centers: • over-building a data center • underusing an existing data center • using cooling technology inefficiently.
With 80% of a data center’s costs going toward the electrical and mechanical systems, Inertech teams determined that the only way to effect real change was to drive down the cost of a center’s cooling system and electrical blocks.
Using the Danfoss, Baltimore, portfolio of products and application expertise, Inertech personnel were able to develop a solution that scales mechanical and energy infrastructure directly to servers and storage use, which has yielded significant savings in water and electricity costs.
The majority of a data center’s upfront costs are in building chiller infrastructure. The average data center is constructed to a “perceived build,” based on the anticipated IT capacity. Companies try to predetermine the size of chiller plants needed to support IT. However, these calculations are highly complex and difficult to accurately predict. Often, companies significantly overbuild data centers, unnecessarily inflating their capital costs.
Operators of existing data centers, working under this energy-capacity model, were spending nearly 85% of their capital expense upfront. These operators would start up their IT kits only to learn that the total system
Top. Data centers use nearly 2% of the world’s supply of electricity at any given time, and 37% of that amount is used to keep computing equipment cool.
Left. Inertech’s approach to cooling and water usage reduces data-center startup costs by as much as 85% and results in chiller-plant effi ciencies of 80% to 90%.
capacity was much greater than the actual load.
Earl Keisling, Intertech CEO, explained that, “IT systems are designed, like in the financial industry, to ‘follow the sun around.’ These systems are designed to support very high loads in a given area, whether it be Hong Kong or the London stock exchange, but have to be able to support low loads as well. The problem with the original technology–these large chiller plants–is that they only work well when they’re fully loaded, because that’s what they were designed for.”
Keisling added that when data centers are operating they never draw more than 60% of the wattage listed on the server nameplate. “Therein lies the problem—that you designed a system for servers, and your utilization is only a fraction of what that name plate is.”
If companies overbuild their cooling systems, or install products they aren’t using, it is operationally and fiscally inefficient. The lack of a supply-chain model that scales products to requirements has fueled the perpetual repetition of this costly practice.
INNOVATIVE SOLUTION Inertech’s patented model has been able to reduce 80% to 85% of the cost of starting a data center. On the operational side, because Inertech’s cooling systems are 90% more effi cient than a traditional chiller plant, it is able to drastically cut the electrical infrastructure that supports that data center for its customers.
Inertech built a platform of small modular cooling blocks that can be scaled to actual IT use. It worked with Danfoss to identify critical components that would enable it to maximize efficiencies for energy and water use. The system design supports data center needs in a much more cost-effective delivery model than a traditional chiller plant, as the smaller platforms can be installed exactly when they are needed, or ‘just-in-time,’ without interrupting IT online operations.
Inertech’s cooling cycles were designed modularly, in the equipment, as well as in the physical infrastructure, enabling data centers to scale over time. Working in a supply chain of four to six weeks, Danfoss and Inertech deploy and hook up pre-assembled modular units to data centers based on their actual IT use, which has resulted in energy efficiency of 80% to 90%, versus a normal chiller plant.
A traditional 10-MW data center would typically require 20 MW to have sufficient power to get the chiller plant back online in the event of a power outage. Modularizing the system with small Turbocor blocks resulted in very low in rush, only using the compressors as needed, which reduced the electrical infrastructure required from 100% overhead to 15%.
Inertech’s Cactus Units use about 80% to 85% less water than a traditional chiller plant. This particular unit also affords data centers the ability to run dry, providing added flexibility to compensate for the atmosphere and surrounding conditions. space,” said Marcus Moliteus, vice president of sales and engineering at Inertech. “By doing that we can provide our clients with a modular chiller plant or cooler solution in 350- to 500-kW modular blocks. We’ve worked closely with Danfoss to reduce amperage on the Turbocor compressor the way we apply it in our patented cycle and, by doing so, have created efficiencies beyond what the original product intended.” The collaboration has enabled Inertech to create multiple efficiencies, reduce the overall environmental footprint, and drive costs
down for its customers. CA
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