JISC

Increasing levels of public commitment and political resolve are required to solve the world’s energy- related challenges. Technological innovation in energy efficiency and low carbon building design are playing increasingly important roles in greenhouse gas emission reduction.

Energy efficiency measures are cheaper than conventional electricity generation and each government unit of investment in energy efficiency measures is returned to the public over a hundred fold in the form of energy savings.

Built environment research activity is an increasingly important global discipline, as buildings contribute between 40% and 60% of all energy use in most developed economies. Low carbon building design is a major driver for widespread adoption of renewable technology solutions. Energy efficient design strategies need to be explored, demonstrated and widely adopted in the years ahead.

Meanwhile, although the trend is to increase the efficiency of ICT server equipment, through replacement, consolidation onto blade centres, and consolidation into virtualisation farms, the cost of disposing of waste heat from server rooms means that the energy (and hence carbon pollution) footprint of the server room is perhaps 50% higher than for the same energy dissipation in non-air conditioned spaces.

The deployment of Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) LAN for UHI’s new ubiquitous Wi-Fi service has recently concentrated our minds on this area. Our recent VMware project slashed the number of physical servers installed and at the same time moved all the remaining physical servers into the data centre; the deployment of PoE LAN, which moves the power supply losses for PoE supplied equipment into the server room, is another move of heat source into the one consolidated area. This concentration of heat sources may make the recovery and re-use of waste heat a practical proposition even as the efficiency of the ICT equipment improves over time.

This project is focused on the use of innovative energy informatics tools to analyse and if possible reduce the carbon footprint of three different UHI Millennium Institute server rooms. The goal is to develop a methodology and knowledge-base that can be readily used by institutions facing similar challenges.

The study would use three real-world server rooms of varying scale and explore their potential, including if practicable the installation of heat recovery plant at one or more of them.

The project would be delivered as a collaborative effort between the ICT professionals of UHI’s Learning and Information Services (LIS) department, and the buildings and renewable energy experts in the Greenspace Research unit at Lews Castle College UHI.

We would also make use of existing contacts in the renewable energy sector, including Community Energy Scotland, based in Dingwall, Highland, and contracted to the Scottish Government to deliver the CARES programme of grant aid for renewable energy initiatives.

Real-world scenarios

We will use Greenspace’s Internet-based LiveEnergy built environment energy design tools and methodology at the following sites:

1. The Energy Visualisation and Simulation Laboratory at Greenspace Research, which houses a small computation server farm.
2. The main UHI data centre at Ness Walk, Inverness, which houses various servers, the JANET RNEP and associated routers and firewalls, a blade centre delivering the institutional Citrix thin client service, another blade centre delivering the main virtualisation platform (vmware farm), storage area network (SAN), main telephone exchange (PBX), etc.
3. The backup UHI data centre at Inverness College UHI (Longman Campus), which houses the College’s own vmware farm, UHI’s replication vmware farm and SAN, the site PBX, and much of the college’s LAN switching.

The LiveEnergy approach is based on

1. intensive Internet-based collaboration by key facility stakeholders
2. development of an Internet-based information model of the facility
3. using the model to explore what-if scenarios regarding the impact of building envelope, heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems and renewable energy technologies and
4. rich reporting on the building and facility portfolio to show design options and operational outcomes.

Among the questions to be investigated in the project are:

1. What is the potential for heat recovery to be an appropriate solution for ICT server rooms as opposed to standard heat extraction/air conditioning? This includes
2. How much energy can be economically extracted?
3. Is there a ready use for that energy, either seasonally or year-round?
4. Is the heat output of the server room well matched to the heat requirement of the building?
5. Is the energy available likely to be stable and matched to the estates demand over the life of a recovery plant?
6. What cost-plan considerations are important for heat recovery installations?
7. What heat recovery technologies, eg. domestic/light commercial size heat pump technology are appropriate for small to midsized server rooms?
8. What server room specific characteristics should design tools support?

Detailed reports will be written for each facility.

A management decision support tool will be developed in LiveEnergy, including a rule- of-thumb calculator with inputs derived from

• size/electrical consumption of the server room [and how to find that out]
• size/capacity of the rest of the building to absorb recovered heat [and how to assess that]

and decision support output being, in essence:

• give up now - its pointless [ explore other avenues instead ]
• do it straight away - its obvious [ and here are some signposts to taking it forwards ] with figures for projected savings which can be easily re-used in an investment justification
• further study required [ and how to go about that ]

The project outputs are all to be aimed at ICT staff rather than at Estates professionals, and geared to be applicable across the smaller HE and the FE sector UK-wide.

Greenspace Research

Greenspace Research is an energy efficiency and low carbon research group based at Lews Castle College UHI, located in Stornoway, the largest town in the Western Isles of Scotland. The group is working with organisations such as Autodesk GreenBuildingStudio and Sintef on green building and energy economics applications.

LiveEnergy

LiveEnergy is a software service developed by Greenspace Research to assist in reducing carbon footprints in the built environment. LiveEnergy is an internet-based collaborative tool which is integrated with a low carbon design approach involving 3D modelling and energy analysis of the building project. Certificates and recommendations to reduce carbon can also be generated by the application.

Energy analysis operates around a three dimensional virtual simulation of the facility and solutions to low carbon output can be explored from a design, business and environmental perspective. In evaluating the carbon footprint of an existing building with a view to reducing emissions, many factors need to be discussed, assessed, and analysed. This process may highlight the need for modifications to the structure, fenestration and construction or the requirement for new and updated technology installation to promote the use of more natural light, improved insulation, natural ventilation or external shading.

Using Building Information Management (BIM) techniques, the available options can be properly appraised and the costs weighed against the benefits, resulting in an informed decision on investment.