摘要：What can be done to make cooling systems in data centers more energy efficient? Andy Woods, Cambridge University Power generation accounts for about 40 to 45 percent of the primary energy supply in the US and the UK, and a good fraction is used to heat, cool, and ventilate buildings. A new and growing challenge in this sector concerns computer data centers and other equipment used to cool computer data systems. On the order of 6 billion kilowatt hours of power was used in data centers in 2006 in the US, representing about 1.5 percent of the country’s electricity consumption. Of this power demand, much more than 20 percent is typically used for cooling the computer equipment, but some newer installations have managed to reduce consumption through a series of innovations in the design of data-center cooling systems, as well as improvements in the software and hardware. The need to control power consumption is of increasing importance as computing power grows and large data centers house increasingly dense arrays of servers. A number of different systems can be adopted to provide cooling for these large, energy-intense buildings, and opportunities continue to emerge for improving the energy efficiency of cooling schemes.
