The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), a federally funded research center, has launched a new project to address the increasing energy consumption of data center cooling. It aims to incorporate geothermal underground thermal energy storage (UTES) technology at data center sites nationwide.
Traditional cooling systems - that cool servers through cold air or liquid cooling - account for as much as 40 percent of data center annual energy consumption. However, geothermal technologies such as the Cold Underground Thermal Energy Storage (Cold UTES) project use off-peak power to create underground cold energy reserves, which can be incorporated into existing data center cooling systems and used during grid peak load hours, reducing energy consumption.
“Our expectation is that a Cold UTES system can provide a long-duration energy storage and industrial-scale cooling solution that is commercially attractive and technically viable for data centers,” said Jeff Winick, technology manager at DOE’s Geothermal Technologies Office. “This project will confirm the potential of these systems to provide significant savings and value to data center operators, utilities, and grid system operators.”
