Mapping Europe is no easy task.

For a start there is the issue of all of those nation states and border disputes which mean it is definitely not a United States of Europe. Economically and culturally, Europe is a very diverse place.

And this means that even mapping the weather is far more complex than, say, mapping the weather in the US. And if you are trying to track the weather in order to help businesses make decisions on which millions of pounds will rest you need as much accurate data as you can muster.

There is, as Vic Smith, Dell representative and EMEA technical work group chair of The Green Grid, says, no common post code for Europe.

The consortium that is the Green Grid has extended its free tool for mapping cooling to Europe. The tool is based on the work done in the US and to a lesser extent, Japan.

‘On the tool front there were a couple of things we changed based on the feedback. Users said to us that when they were first looking at the tool there was a lot of information on it and unless you really knew what you were doing it was hard to understand and you had to stare at it for an hour. So we made the usability better,’ he said.

Also changed was the humidity setting which in the original tool was put to a default position based on the latest Ashrae figures. So we removed that because people told us they were going to humidify anyway and would calculate the cost of it.

'On the map front – (Green Grid members can get high res map – non members get a low res version) some of the feedback we got on the US map helped us improve this one. For example on the first map the colours were inverted – normally cold is in blue and hot in red – original map had cold areas in red and hot areas in blue, so we switched it round,' says Smith.

Mark Munro of Sun was the man who drove the development of the original tool and the decision was made to go to tender for the data collection. Weatherbank won the contract and subsequently won the deal for the European mapping also. 'We spoke with organizations such as the UK Met office but realized it would cost a fortune to do it across Europe. We were pleased with the data that Weatherbank gave us and the cost was limited,' he says.

How the system is being used:
The tool and the map are not a replacement for consultation but rather should be seen as an additional resource.

'People are using this system – not as a replacement for consultation but for looking at what savings could be made. The maps are also not a replacement for a consultation exercise but can be used as a guide to start making a decision, e.g. here is the type of savings I might make if I picked northern France instead of Southern France.'

Where is the data?
The system has a web front end with the tool calculating the details based on the data entered. It is anonymous with no company names or identification needed, says Smith, so companies can be confident that they are not giving anything away.

How it works
Using country and city names, the tool allows data centre managers in Europe to input their specific variables - such as local energy costs, IT load, and facility load - to determine the specific potential energy savings for individual facilities. In addition to free cooling from outside air, the tool provides information about savings that could be obtained using water-side economisers.
For example: Members of The Green Grid will have access to a high resolution graphical map of the estimated hours of air-side and water-side economisation possible for Europe and many specific countries. Lower resolution maps of European free cooling estimates are available to the public at The Green Grid Web site.
The free cooling tool for EMEA contains information from 608 weather stations throughout Europe. The database consists of all available hourly observations taken during the period extending from 1999 through 2008. This count of hours is then divided by 10 (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.

The tool is for the following European countries: Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and United Kingdom.



Related Event: A round table discussion on the mapping tool will be held at DatacenterDynamics London 10th, 11th November 2009
Related Event: DatacenterDynamics Paris Command and Control Summit
Related Event: DatacenterDynamics Amsterdam