Participating company | Chindata Group |
Project location | China |
Industry | Telecommunications |
Technologies used | Natural cooling (direct evaporation), intelligent control system, intelligent lighting system, utilisation of waste heat for heating, utilisation of renewable energies (PV, wind). |
Energy efficiency | Reduction of electricity consumption by 101 GWh/yr (31% of previous consumption). |
CO2 savings | 248,000 t CO2e/yr |
Investment | €2,000,000,000 |
Payback period | More than 8 years |
Funding: | Federal subsidy worth €6,580,000 |
Chindata Group Holdings Ltd is a China-based company that builds data centres. In 2020, Chindata built the data centre for the Taihang Mountain Energy and Information Technology Industrial Campus. The data centre is comprised of seven data centre units and ancillary facilities with a total floor space of 330,000 m2, which makes it a very large data centre in central China. The data centre was designed to minimise cooling requirements. Furthermore, Chindata developed an innovative evaporative cooling method to meet the data centre’s cooling requirements: evaporative cooling utilises the temperature difference between dry and wet cooling and makes use of the fact that water molecules absorb heat when evaporating. The evaporative cooling system is combined with multi-stage evaporation technology in order to maximise the use of natural cooling sources. The result is that the centre can use natural cooling almost all year round. Evaporative condensers are only used for cooling on a few hot days a year. The total PUE value was thus able to be reduced to 1.1. The annual cooling load factor is less than 0.09, which means that for every kWh of electricity used, 11 kWh of heat is removed, which is over 50 per cent more efficient than traditional data centre cooling methods. Waste heat from the data centre is used to heat the offices. An intelligent lighting system with energy-efficient light sources was also implemented.
