AtlasWater UseMateo Mesenholl, Fiona Wong, Lilo Patt, and Janka Beck
Data centers are crucial for everyday life. Most of the time, we don’t even realize the impact a data center has. Every text message, email, chatroom data centers manage our communication and bought online storage space. To run properly, servers need a temperature of around 18°C. Considering that these servers run 24 hours a day, 365 days per year they produce quite a lot of heat. Therefore, the cooling of these severs is crucial. The best working cooling technologies rely on water. With data centers increasing in number in size, increasingly more water is needed. This is problematic because over 50 % of the world’s population live in areas of drought or are experiencing drought on a regular basis. Since water is scarce, data centers need to buy potable water and negotiate with public authorities, arguing for how crucial the functioning of their infrastructure is. Some data centre enterprises seem to be more aware of the problematic of a high water consumption and are investing in state-of-the-art technologies to reduce the usage.
The Circle
The city is heated through the Lake-Energy-Network. Cold water is taken out of the Lake Lucerne at a depth of 30-40 meters at Inseliquai – in the middle of the city center. There the water is heated and distributed to the neighborhoods for warm water and heating.
Stollen is embedded within the city district heating circle. The Data Center it self is cooled with the lake water and emits the surplus heat into the heating circle of the city. The cold water the transported into the server rooms, which have cold and warm corridors. Inside the server rooms water cools the air and therefore transports the heat back to the heat exchangers of the Stollen-Inseliquai-Loop.
Inside the server rooms the anergy pipes of the closed loop network run beneath the floor to the coolers between the racks. The cold water is pumped into the air heat exchanger, where it cools the hot outside air down to 18°C and is then blown into the cold corridor of the server racks. During this process the water is warmed up and transports the surplus heat away to the heat exchangers of the secondary loop. The surplus heat of the data centre is then again transferred to the city and used for hot water and heating.
The City's Infrastructure
- Fibre Optics Cable
- Water
- Forest
- EWL Infrastructure
EWL gains heating energy out of several waste incineration plants. Those plants heat up the water used for district heating and warm water. From there the water travels into the neighborhood distribution centres, such as Inseliquai. Energy is generated directly in the heart of Lucerne with water turbines in the river. Most importantly for our project are the distribution of the fibre optics cable, here seen in pink.