Estimates suggest that global data centre energy consumption has the potential to double by 2026. As the energy demands from technology providers grow, various renewable solutions will be required to meet these needs and provide reliable, carbon-free power.
This week the Cleantech Group presented an informative webinar on how start-ups are developing solutions to tackle some of the key challenges and opportunities in potential pathways for geothermal and nuclear to play a growing role in providing energy to data centre off-takers, how energy storage systems will be integrated, and liquid cooling tech solutions.
“We really want to help everybody understand what is changing on the data center landscape, given this advent of advanced AI and how we can keep up from a sustainability,” said Anthony DeOrsey, research manager at Cleantech Group, to kick things off.
DeOrsey began by outlining the macro challenge that artificial intelligence (AI) is incredibly resource intensive. Some estimates are putting the future energy demand for advanced AI systems at 1,000x of what is consumed today. He further explained that power usage is not just going to rise, it’s going to rise in specific geographies.
Zainab Gilani, an associate for the Energy & Power division at Cleantech Group, provided an overview of trends related to IT systems for AI.
“A model that struck us as quite interesting is the pre-fabricated modular data centres,” said Gilani, who explained the differences between the traditional and the microconvective directed chip, which essentially uses a perpendicular jet fluid so it tries to target the chip with a little bit more pinpoint accuracy. Another key technology she mentioned is “precision immersion,” which combines attributes from immersion cooling and direct to chip.
Next up, Andrew Lindsey, co-founder and chief executive officer of Flexnode, a digital infrastructure company delivering distributed, high-performance data centre solutions, provided insights into the cooling technology space and where certain areas might be gaining traction with customers. “When it comes to the cooling market, as far the best or most effective approaches, realistically speaking, they all have a unique value in one way or another, and the market has not yet settled on exactly which one of these types of approaches to specifically leverage with our customer base.”
Lindsey said that the largest demand so far has been for the direct shift single phase. However, he added that is also now see an interesting uptick in alternative solutions depenbding on the size of the footprint and land mass available, and related accessibility to renewable energy such as solar and wind. “Some of the challenges associated with solar wind is just the fact that they can have a large land footprint.”
Key Takeaways: Making sense of the trends
- Price insensitive hyper-scaler customers are transforming the data centre sustainability space into a tech de-risking “sandbox.”
- Expect to see multiple waves of tech rollout, beginning with those that can get data centres to operations today, followed by those that can draw down power consumption.
- Expect to see pick-up in investment, deployment, and exits, from the power use reduction technologies – especially where renewables are too far behind to catch up.
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Featured image credit: Getty Images
