Demonstration of Low-Cost Data Center Liquid Cooling

Data centers consume approximately 2 percent of California’s electricity demand. Reports by Digital Power Group at the time of this application indicate that the amount could be as high as 10 percent. While overall commercial and residential building energy efficiency has made dramatic advances over the past 5 to 10 years, efficiency in data centers continues to increase in size and power, and the percentage of California electricity consumed by this single industry is increasing. Approximately 40 percent of this electricity is used to cool the data centers. As such, data center cooling efficiency represents one of the largest and most important energy-efficiency measures in the state.

RackCDU™ is a unique, pre-commercial data center efficiency technology that brings high-performance liquid cooling directly to the hottest elements inside each server, with the potential to cut cooling energy by 60 percent to 80 percent and server energy consumption by an additional 5 percent to 10 percent. This innovative design could be retrofitted into existing servers and data centers, enabling rapid adoption across all California data centers. If deployed in existing data centers, RackCDU™ could annually save California ratepayers up to 2,400 gigawatt hours of electricity and $340 million.

This project validated the performance, reliability, and lifecycle cost benefits of RackCDU™ in two full-scale California data centers. This project provided operational insights to create awareness and acceptance of this advanced pre-commercial technology across California, accelerating commercialization and leading to significant ratepayer benefits.