The United States Department of Energy (DOE) has announced up to $42 million in funding to overcome technology barriers associated with the development of high-performance energy efficient cooling solutions for data centres.
Used to house computers, storage systems and computing infrastructure, data centres account for approximately two per cent of total US electricity production while data centre cooling can account for up to 40 per cent of data centre energy usage overall.
DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) will fund projects that seek to reduce the amount of energy data centres use for cooling to lower the operational carbon footprint associated with powering and cooling data centres. This funding will support President Joe Biden’s goal to be a net zero carbon emissions economy no later than 2050.
US secretary of energy, Jennifer M. Granholm, said extreme weather events, like the soaring temperatures much of the country experienced this summer, also impact data centres which connect critical computing and network infrastructure and must be kept at certain temperatures to remain operational.
Creating solutions to cool data centres efficiently and reduce the associated carbon emissions supports the technological breakthroughs needed to fight climate change and secure our clean energy future,” she said.
ARPA-E's funding program aims to develop highly efficient and reliable cooling systems that will enable a new class of efficient power-dense computational systems, data centres and modular systems.
The program will prioritize four technical categories for cooling system innovation opportunities including energy efficient cooling solutions for next generation high power density servers and high power density modular data centres that can be operated anywhere efficiently.
The third category is software and modeling tool development to design and optimize data centres’ energy use, CO2 footprint, reliability, and cost, simultaneously.
The final category is facilities and best practices for efficient evaluation and demonstration of transformational technologies developed under the program.