The Green Grid's new free cooling calculator tool.
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org), an organization of IT companies that work toward advancing energy efficiency in data centers, announced last week it launched a new online tool and maps that lets North American data center managers figure out how much free cooling is available.
Free cooling can help data center managers reduce energy consumption and related costs, and potentially can extend the lifespan of data center facilities.
In February, managed hosting provider Rackspace launched a free “carbon calculator” tool that estimates an organization’s total carbon footprint based on a survey the business fills out.
“Data centers with increasing IT loads require more power to cool them, so finding cooling options that use less power is critical not only for organizations that don’t have resources to build new facilities but also for those that want to save money,” says Mark Monroe, a director of The Green Grid. “For much of the year, the air outside data centers can be cooler than the air inside. The tool that The Green Grid has developed will help determine how much free cooling a specific data center can leverage.”
Users in the United States and Canada can access the free tool, entering in their zip codes and specific variables including local energy costs, IT load, and facility load, to determine the energy savings for individual facilities.
Not only does the tool help determine the amount of available free cooling from outside air, it also provides information about savings that could be made using water-side economizers.
The organization offers the example of a 1MW data center in San Jose with the zip code 95101 and a power cost of 12.78 cents per kW hour being able to save $66,000 per year using free cooling, or $160,000 per year using a water-side economizer.
Though the tool is free for everyone to use, The Green Grid members can access a high-resolution graphical map of free cooling throughout the US and Canada, while non-members can download a low-resolution version in the “Library and Tools” section of The Green Grid site.
Additionally, maps by specific zip code can be accessed by contacting Weatherbank (www.weatherbank.com), a company that offers weather and environmental solutions using a historical weather and climatological database.
The tool is a part of The Green Grid’s new programs, tools and metrics and reporting guidelines, which was launched in February.
The initiative is designed to help data center managers worldwide improve the efficiency of their facilities and operations by exploring different methods for measuring and reporting energy efficiency and data center productivity.
The Green Grid’s free cooling tool includes information from 2,186 weather stations throughout the United States and Canada.
The database consists of all hourly observations taken during the period from 1999 through 2008.
This count of hours is then divided by 10 — the total years of data — to provide a result of the “normal” number of occurrences during a given year.
The total number of hours of available free cooling will always range from 0 to 8760 hours, says The Green Grid.
The organization also offers a related free cooling white paper that can be downloaded from The Green Grid’s website here.
