I attended most of the first day of a day-and-a-half program run by the Department of Energy in San Francisco this week, where presentations were delivered covering fourteen research projects into energy efficiency technologies for data centers and telecomm facilities.
The projects were funded through the DOE's Industrial Technologies Program, using $47 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
I admit it would be unfair to attempt to "grade" the results of the projects for any number of reasons (many are not complete, for example), not the least of which is my complete lack of ability to understand some of them on a technical level.
(I'm a mechanical engineer, so I had one of those "understanding every fifth word" experiences when Ken Shepard from Columbia University described "IC-level Integrated DC-DC Conversion for Energy-Efficient Multicore Processors".)
However, for the ones I did understand, there were some standouts. Lineage Power Corporation (now a part of General Electric), described very highly efficient rectifier equipment packages for telecomm central offices, with a lot of potential for use in traditional data centers as well. When you see power conversion equipment getting into the high nineties in efficiency in normal operation, you have to think there isn't much more to do.
Hewlett-Packard talked about a modular high-density rack unit (four to eight racks, with integral cooling equipment and essentially 100% containment), with capacities as high as 25 kW per rack. I'll give them points for developing an intrinsically efficient system from an air-flow perspective, and even for a system that can use chilled water that is as warm as sixty degrees F. But...any system that isn't expressly able to use outside air or at worst an evaporative chilled water plant (no chillers) just isn't aiming for the right bar in my view.
Love to have my "head stretched" by watching developments in technical areas I'm not fully capable in!
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