Future views on waste heat utilization – Case of data centers in Northern Europe

Wahlroos, Mikko; Pärssinen, Matti; Rinne, Samuli; Syri, Sanna; Manner, Jukka

doi:10.1016/j.rser.2017.10.058

Cited by 148 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 31 publications

(74 reference statements)

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“…It has also been suggested that small-scale distributed servers could be used as heat sources in individual apartments (Woodruff et al 2013), where temperatures of 25 to 35°C would be sufficient to meet heating demands. On a larger scale, utilizing waste heat in district heating systems is becoming common in Northern Europe (Wahlroos et al 2018;Davies et al 2016). For use in district heating, low-grade heat must be upgraded with heat pumps in order to reach temperatures of 75 to 120°C for distribution in district heating networks, although fourth-generation district heating can be run with supply temperatures of 45 to 55°C (Wahlroos et al 2018;Lund et al 2014).…”

Section: Heat Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Data centres in future European energy systems—energy efficiency, integration and policy

2019

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End-use efficiency, demand response and coupling of different energy vectors are important aspects of future renewable energy systems. Growth in the number of data centres is leading to an increase in electricity demand and the emergence of a new electricity-intensive industry. Studies on data centres and energy use have so far focused mainly on energy efficiency. This paper contributes with an assessment of the potential for energy system integration of data centres via demand response and waste heat utilization, and with a review of EU policies relevant to this. Waste heat utilization is mainly an option for data centres that are close to district heating systems. Flexible electricity demand can be achieved through temporal and spatial scheduling of data centre operations. This could provide more than 10 GW of demand response in the European electricity system in 2030. Most data centres also have auxiliary power systems employing batteries and stand-by diesel generators, which could potentially be used in power system balancing. These potentials have received little attention so far and have not yet been considered in policies concerning energy or data centres. Policies are needed to capture the potential societal benefits of energy system integration of data centres. In the EU, such policies are in their nascent phase and mainly focused on energy efficiency through the voluntary Code of Conduct and criteria under the EU Ecodesign Directive. Some research and development in the field of energy efficiency and integration is also supported through the EU Horizon 2020 programme. Our analysis shows that there is considerable potential for demand response and energy system integration. This motivates greater efforts in developing future policies, policy coordination, and changes in regulation, taxation and electricity market design.

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Section: Heat Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Several data centres are currently developing this concept in Scandinavia (Wahlroos et al 2018). Stockholm Data Parks (2019) is an example where several data centres are co-located around a central heat pump station that increases the temperature of the waste heat and supplies the district heating network.…”

Section: Heat Integrationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Data centres in future European energy systems—energy efficiency, integration and policy

2019

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“…Increase of cloud computation demand and capability results in growing hyperscale cloud servers that consume a huge amount of energy. In 2010, data centers accounted for 1.1-1.5% of the world's total electricity consumption [2], with a spike to 4% in 2014 [3] raised by the move of localized computing to cloud facilities. It is anticipated that the energy consumption of data centers will double every five years [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Workload-Aware Opportunistic Energy Efficiency in Multi-FPGA Platforms

Salamat

Khaleghi

Imani

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)

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The continuous growth of big data applications with high computational and scalability demands has resulted in increasing popularity of cloud computing. Optimizing the performance and power consumption of cloud resources is therefore crucial to relieve the costs of data centers. In recent years, multi-FPGA platforms have gained traction in data centers as lowcost yet high-performance solutions particularly as acceleration engines, thanks to the high degree of parallelism they provide. Nonetheless, the size of data centers workloads varies during service time, leading to significant underutilization of computing resources while consuming a large amount of power, which turns out as a key factor of data center inefficiency, regardless of the underlying hardware structure. In this paper, we propose an efficient framework to throttle the power consumption of multi-FPGA platforms by dynamically scaling the voltage and hereby frequency during runtime according to prediction of, and adjustment to the workload level, while maintaining the desired Quality of Service (QoS). This is in contrast to, and more efficient than, conventional approaches that merely scale (i.e., power-gate) the computing nodes or frequency. The proposed framework carefully exploits a pre-characterized library of delay-voltage, and power-voltage information of FPGA resources, which we show is indispensable to obtain the efficient operating point due to the different sensitivity of resources w.r.t. voltage scaling, particularly considering multiple power rails residing in these devices. Our evaluations by implementing state-of-the-art deep neural network accelerators revealed that, providing an average power reduction of 4.0×, the proposed framework surpasses the previous works by 33.6% (up to 83%).

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“…The potential of recovering waste heat from data centers was investigated by the authors of [18][19][20], who highlighted the high energy consumption associated with cooling systems in data centers and indicated how recovering low-grade waste heat from these systems can increase the operating efficiency of data centers. The authors of [19] showed how a data center can be cooled by air, liquid or a combination of the two (hybrid cooling).…”

Section: Data Centersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Opportunities for Integrating Underground Railways into Low Carbon Urban Energy Networks: A Review

et al. 2019

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Cities demand vast amounts of energy for their everyday operation, resulting in significant degradation of energy in the form of heat in the urban environment. This leads to high cooling requirements in cities, while also presenting the opportunity to reuse such waste heat in order to provide low-carbon heating for buildings and processes. Among the many potential energy sources that could be exploited in urban areas, underground railway tunnels are particularly attractive, as the operation of the trains produce considerable amounts of heat throughout the year. This paper reviews how secondary energy sources in urban areas can be integrated into heating and cooling networks, with emphasis on underground rail tunnels. This involves investigating potential urban waste heat sources and the existing state-of-the-art technologies that could be applied to efficiently recover this secondary energy, as well as analyzing how district heating and cooling networks have been a key mechanism to allow for a smooth transition from current fossil fuel based to future low-carbon energy sources.

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Future views on waste heat utilization – Case of data centers in Northern Europe

Cited by 148 publications

References 31 publications

Data centres in future European energy systems—energy efficiency, integration and policy

Data centres in future European energy systems—energy efficiency, integration and policy

Workload-Aware Opportunistic Energy Efficiency in Multi-FPGA Platforms

Opportunities for Integrating Underground Railways into Low Carbon Urban Energy Networks: A Review

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