In the first part of our interview with Danielle Rossi, data center strategic manager at Trane, a manufacturer, and supplier of cooling technologies, which also provides training, advice, and support to operators on how to make the most of their data centers, we looked at the raging debate over air vs liquid cooling. This time, we’re looking at sustainability, the part that cooling plays in the overall green strategy of the data center, and why every operator needs to incorporate it into their strategies.

Rossi warns that, while the issue is often tacked onto strategy documents as an afterthought, it's important to balance redressing that with the dangers of tokenism and greenwashing. She tells us:

“You can claim certain things all day – carbon offsets or those types of things – but it doesn't mean that it's going to be beneficial to the industry or the environment. And we don't have the best name for this industry right now. Customers get in the news over how they're using too much water and power. We're trying to do a bit of mitigation there.”

But what does mitigation look like?

“People need to have more conversations about true sustainability goals, and then roll out sustainable actions that they might not have had a couple of years ago, along with those very outside-the-box ideas that we need to make a difference. We don't want to be those people that our neighbors or the rest of the industry looks at and says, ‘Well, they're the ones raining on the parade.”

We ask Rossi why she thinks that data centers have attracted such a particular interest when every business in every sector needs to focus on a green future. She muses:

“The general definition is the planet aspect – Does it help the environment? Is it something that's going to be helping to decrease carbon and truly affect the planet? Then there is social. Are we making this an approved and feasible thing for our neighbors and the communities that we're in? Then there’s the economy, it's not going to be sustainable if we can't make it sustainable financially.”

This last point often speaks to the rub of these discussions – how much companies are willing to do, if it’s the right thing to do, but doesn’t make any money, or as Rossi puts it: “If there's no profit to it, then it's not necessary, it's not necessarily going to stay.”

But she adds that with legislation being passed all the time; if you don’t look for the carrots, you may find yourself on the wrong end of the stick:

“Take heat reuse – that's going to be the law in some areas going forward. In the US, it's going to be more of the carrot option where they're going to offer heat, the ACT (Advanced Corporation Tax) rebates, or things like that. In Europe, it's the stick option, where legislation requires you have a certain amount of reuse incorporated to be able to build a data center.”

But even the most seemingly trivial things can benefit the community and the environment, and yet still have a positive impact on the business:

“It could be a community pool or rooftop garden, and that goes to the social aspect. While for the environment, you're reusing the heat, you're not sending it into the atmosphere. From a profit standpoint, that still helps because you can potentially charge heat back to the grid.”

Another option is to shrink your data center through consolidation:

“From a company standpoint, PUE drops, operating costs lessen, and you can lease your open footprint if you're making your data center smaller. Or if you have an existing data center, focus on what can be done to make it more sustainable. Not just some sensor lighting or something – a full audit of your space to make sure those can get a little bit more efficient.”

A great boon of recent years has been the vast improvement in real-time analytics and visualization of the data center environment, coupled with granular controls over that environment. Just as your smart thermostat may have cut your home heating bills, a well-controlled data center can be a greener, cheaper, more efficient one. Rossi says:

“Everybody just assumes that you want visibility in your data center, why wouldn't you? However, people use it to say there's a problem, or there isn't a problem. They're not looking at this to plan – it's very reactive.”

She goes on to say, “If you aren't controlling your DSM (Dynamic System Monitoring) properly you’re not efficient. If you have controls for it, and it's being properly managed and monitored, then you can see when things are not correct, or what things need to be changed to get the best efficiency. Same if you're not maintaining your equipment properly – if you have a car and you don't change the oil regularly, its gas mileage is probably terrible. If you're not using data to better the data center it's a waste – you're not going to get any planning out of it, so you're not going to better your facility.”

Throughout, Rossi is keen to make sure that an important point is not lost, that the industry shouldn’t always be looking for the payoff for their efforts:

“Other industries are doing worse when it comes to their sustainability practices but the big takeaway for everyone is that power shortage has become a focus – and you don't see anyone else taking up the same power as an entire country.”

Rossi goes on to talk us through the questions we need to ask when thinking about sustainability:

“Some things we should be doing as an industry, even when there's no payback. For example, some of our chillers use sustainable and repurposed steel. It's wonderful that we do that. However, it's more expensive – there's no ROI, but we do it because we can, and it's the right thing to do. But because it costs more money, and then there's no social benefit to it, everyone goes, ‘Well, that's great’ and that's about it. But at what point will that require regulation?”

It’s not just the materials that make Trane’s take on cooling greener:

“We already make heat recovery chillers so we can go directly from cooling the data center to recovering the heat. Heat recovery is getting its day but it's a surprise it hasn't been bigger earlier because it's such an available thing for us in the industry. It's going to be so beneficial going forward to say we're reutilizing all of this heat – it goes a long way.”

As we draw to a close, Rossi reminds us that even the smallest data center can make a difference through heat reuse and that to think otherwise is a mistake:

“There are a lot of lost opportunities where people say, ‘I can't use it for district heating. What's the point?’ If you go to Scandinavia, it's extremely common to use it for fishing, agriculture, and other needs. It's just second nature to them. Even if your data center is not near any housing, but you have some local businesses nearby, who's to say you can't have those conversations during the planning stages, to offer localized heat reuse to a mini-mall?”

For more information about Trane click here