Potential of air-side economizers for data center cooling: A case study for key Australian cities

The provision of low cost cooling is challenging due to high energy costs and increasing heat dissipation volumes from data centers. In Australia, with the introduction of emissions trading scheme, the cost of energy with carbon origin is expected to increase. In order to reduce cooling costs, alternative low cost cooling methods for data centers are highly sought after. In this study, we investigated using air-side economizers to introduce outside air with desired supply air conditions, by exploiting the cool and dry Australian climate conditions. Our approach was based on analyzing the hourly temperature and humidity data gathered over past 12 years for 20 weather monitoring stations across Australia representing all geographical regions and determining the potential of using air-side economizers for those locations. As the result, we demonstrated that there is a sizable potential for using air-side economizers in some states that could lead to significant savings on cooling costs to data center operators.