Digital Realty announced a new cooling tower initiative at its SIN10 data centre. It aims to pioneer new levels of water conservation and efficiency in its Singapore data centres. This initiative is the first of its kind to be implemented in Singapore’s data centre industry.
“Digital Realty is committed to minimizing the environmental impact of data centres. This cooling tower initiative showcases how water usage can become far more efficient,” said Jon Curry, vice president of operations APAC, Digital Realty.
Promising Results
Chemicals are no longer used to treat blow-down water discharge, which is water discharged from cooling equipment to remove mineral build-up, through the process called DCI electrolysis. The same pool of water can now be used three times before being dumped as wastewater. Since implementing this process in February Digital Realty was able to save 1.24 million liters of water every month.
Digital Realty recorded monthly blow-down water discharge at SIN10 decreased by 90%, and water usage efficiency (WUE) improved by 15%, outperforming the Singapore Public Utilities Board’s industry benchmark of 2.6 Cu.m/MWh for data centres by 30%. Curry says that they plan to extend this initiative to other two data centres in Singapore (SIN11 and SIN12) in order to optimize resource use in the industry.
Sustainability as Core
“Sustainability will always be at the core of our business as we continue working toward building and maintaining data centres that maximize our customers’ growth while minimizing our environmental impact,” Curry says.
Digital Realty, the largest global provider of cloud- and carrier-neutral data centre, colocation and interconnection solutions, hopes that others will be inspired to follow this initiative.
Singapore’s business sector currently uses 55% of the nation’s overall water supply. With this figure projected to increase to 70% by 2060, water sustainability is necessarily a firm focus for Singapore's data centre industry.
