Having Your Data Center Cake and Being Able to Eat it, too!
By Tom & Carol Braford
Macro data center proposals in the St Louis area are coming under heightened scrutiny for good reason, given their massive energy and water use, but let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water.
Some advantages of having dispersed micro data centers at the scale of Islands of Coherence Communities of Practice include: faster deployment, lower cost, improved performance through reduced latency, increased flexibility and scalability and the ability to operate in challenging or space constrained environments. They are ideal for edge computing applications by providing localized, self-contained and remotely manageable computing power close to the data source, encouraging reliability and optimized efficiency.
They only need 500 to 1000 square feet, with an energy draw of under 100 to 150 KW, which is about 10 to 15% of our typical community’s renewable energy system output.
These micro data centers can also be placed in the middle of a community, between the centralized summer seasonal heat storage well field facility and the winter cold storage well field facility. The heat produced by the micro data center can be utilized for domestic hot water and winter heat requirements. A seasonal cold storage facility can provide super energy efficient air conditioning to the surrounding community, while also offsetting the potential increased urban heat island effect associated with macro data centers.
Solar canopies can be designed so they capture rainfall, which in St. Louis is expected to reach 4 feet a year. Harvesting this precipitation can also offset both micro data center demand for distilled water cooling and on-site urban agriculture needs, completely eliminating any increased demand on the city water supply.
Macro data centers can vaporize as much as .5M gallons of water a day. In a city where we are experiencing more and more days approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit with relatively high humidity as well, this could be fatal and could make the area surrounding these macro data centers uninhabitable by human beings on some days.
To learn more, please contact us at braford@sbcglobal.net or at www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com.