Levelized cost analysis of indirect evaporative cooling in a data centre

Abstract

Given the eruption of AI technology, the cooling requirement in data centres has drawn significant attention due to the increasing demand for data processing and storage. Indirect evaporative cooling (IEC) is a cutting-edge cooling technology with huge advantages of energy economy and environmental friendliness compared with conventional mechanical vapour compression cooling systems. Herein, we perform a levelized cost analysis (LCA) to determine the economic performance and energy consumption of the traditional mechanical vapor compression (MVC) cooling system and a novel hybrid IEC + MVC cooling system in data centre applications. A data centre model is adopted and applied in various climate zones in 10 cities from 8 countries. The results showed that the hybrid IEC + MVC system presented energy savings in all the cities, especially in Riyadh, with an energy saving of 41.3 GWh for the year. Most cities showed cost saving with the hybrid system, with London and Madrid achieving cost savings of 52–53%. All the cities showed significant CO₂ reduction with the hybrid system, especially in Riyadh (23 547 tons), Jeddah (18 740 tons), and Dubai (12 432 tons). This study sheds light on the cost analysis based on levelized cost analysis (LCA) for next-generation cooling technology for data centres.