Regulations And The Drive To Be More Efficient: How Can Data Center Owners Prepare For The Future?

In the battle to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, few commercial real estate assets face a tougher fight than data centers. These facilities are estimated to be responsible for consuming roughly 3% of the global electric supply and releasing 2% of total GHG emissions. 

These emissions are directly tied to the energy usage of data centers, and indirectly to their construction, so the problem is twofold, said Dave Meadows, director of technology at Stulz USA, which provides cooling and humidity control solutions for data centers. He added that despite the enormity of this problem, the industry has been taking steps to address it. 

“On the operations side, we’ve seen operators become much better about how they design and maintain their air containment, preventing cool supply air from not hitting its target or mixing with the hot return air, both of which can negatively affect the efficiency of the cooling system,” he said. “On the actual equipment and design side, we're finding the most efficient prime mover that we can, whether it be for a pump or a fan or a compressor, to try to lower the overall energy usage of each component.”

Meadows said that by decreasing energy consumption, data centers can take major steps toward reducing their GHG emissions, as he estimates that 80% of all power generation for data centers comes from fossil fuels. 

Regulations On The Rise 

While the data center industry was mostly unregulated for years, with no energy efficiency metric to hit, things have changed significantly, Meadows said. He cited the Sensible Coefficient of Performance, which was put into effect in 2016 and mandated by the federal government. It required a certain level of efficiency from computer room air conditioners, or CRAC units, for the first time. 

Today, the industry has moved from the SCOP metric and to the Net Sensible Coefficient Performance metric, which has increased the efficiency requirements. Additionally, ASHRAE 90.4 is a relatively new standard from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers that provides minimum energy efficiency requirements for the design and operation of data centers.

Meadows said that complying with these codes and regulations becomes more difficult in warmer environments, where operators need to work harder to keep their centers cool. He mentioned another recent regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency which states that data centers can only use refrigerants that have a global warming potential of 700 or less starting in January 2027, which will require a major overhaul of most CRAC units. 

While complying with these new regulations may seem like a burden, Meadows said there are benefits for operators as well. 

“Meeting these regulations is important for data center operators on an economical scale,” Meadows said. “Operators need to strive to have the most economically viable data centers, which is of course driven by efficiency.” 

The Challenge Ahead 

Meadows said one of the greatest challenges data center operators face when it comes to energy efficiency is that they simply do not have a crystal ball that can see into the future. This makes it hard to plan a sustainability strategy when the technology changes so quickly. The key, however, is to work with the technology today while trying to factor in what could come tomorrow. 

“There are a lot of forward-looking data center operators out there that are asking smart questions like, ‘How do I design a data center today that's primarily aimed at air-cooled equipment, but can be flexible enough to support direct liquid-to-chip cooling or immersion cooling,’” he said. “These cooling strategies are both extremely energy efficient and also great at  addressing the challenges of high heat fluxes on very powerful chips.” 

The forward-looking approach is one Stulz plans to take with its data center clients, he said. The company will package and design all of the equipment it provides — from pump packages,  coolant distribution units and CRAC units to computer room air handlers and heat rejection equipment — to be flexible enough for operators to make smart equipment transitions in the future. 

Meadows said that despite being an air conditioning company, Stulz has embraced liquid cooling and believes it could be the primary source of heat removal in the future. On a per volume basis, water is able to remove over 3,600 times the amount of heat for a one-degree change as air can, he said. 

“Water is denser with greater mass on a per volume basis, and also has a higher specific heat capacity at constant pressure,” he said. “So it's just a better medium for moving heat. It also gives us a greater potential to find ways to reuse that heat energy that we're pulling out of the data center today.” 

He said that Stulz is committed to exploring liquid cooling and other options to help the data center industry get closer to its goal of reducing its environmental impact. 

“We're active participants in ASHRAE and the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute, and we work within multiple committees in these bodies to try to develop more energy-efficient approaches to data center cooling,” he said. 

This article was produced in collaboration between Stulz USA and Studio B. Bisnow news staff was not involved in the production of this content.

Studio B is Bisnow’s in-house content and design studio. To learn more about how Studio B can help your team, reach out to studio@bisnow.com.