Danfoss and HP to deliver HPE IT Sustainability Services

Data centres will be a major factor as India, China, and Southeast Asia are expected to account for about 85 percent of the increased electricity demand by 2026. Incorporating AI into India’s growing data centre industry is vital for achieving sustainability and addressing the environmental impact of these facilities.

The rapid integration of AI technologies across organisations and businesses is expected to increase the power demand and utilisation of AI-optimised IT infrastructure. According to the International Energy Agency, by 2026, the AI industry is expected to have grown exponentially to consume at least ten times its electricity demand in 2023. To mitigate these challenges, IT leaders and data centre facility operators are taking action to reduce energy usage, such as implementing modern power-efficient capabilities and improved cooling systems. Excess heat in the EU alone represents an estimated 2,860 TWh/y, almost equal to the EU’s total energy demand for heat and hot water in residential and service sector buildings. The flow of excess heat from data centres is uninterruptible. This constitutes a very reliable source of clean energy.

Danfoss and Hewlett Packard Enterprise will deliver HPE IT Sustainability Services—Data Centre Heat Recovery, an off-the-shelf heat recovery module. It will help organisations manage and value excess heat as they transition towards more sustainable IT facilities.

Ravichandran Purushothaman, President of Danfoss India, said, “Sustainability is at the heart of our partnership with HPE. By harnessing excess heat, we reduce energy consumption and create a reliable source of clean energy. Danfoss heat reuse modules will enable it to capture and reuse heat produced by data centres. It will provide a renewable energy source to supply heating on-site and in neighbouring commercial and residential buildings, communities, and industries that need heat for their processes.”

Benefits and agility of modularity

HPE’s Modular Data Centre (MDC) utilises direct liquid cooling (DLC) technologies to enhance energy efficiency by over 20 percent and optimise energy production and distribution, resulting in significant energy savings. Its compact design minimises energy loss by shortening the transport distance for energy and cooling fluids. It maximises the temperature differential between the inlet and outlet. It promotes the capture of excess heat. Furthermore, the MDC’s agility and the absence of heavy industrial materials eliminate the need for expensive traditional building materials and substantially reduce the time to market.

Deployment is three times quicker than traditional data centres, decreasing from 18 months to as few as six months. Finally, the reduced land footprint and flexibility of the MDCs allow for placement in proximity to data generation sites, diminishing the energy impact and bottlenecks associated with complex networking solutions and data transfer while supporting enhanced data governance and security.

Jürgen Fischer, President of Danfoss Climate Solutions, said, “Our strategic partnership with HPE is a great example of how we revolutionise building and decarbonising the data centre industry with customers. With this latest cross-industry partnership, we are building the blueprint for the next generation of sustainable data centres using technologies available today”.

With unparalleled density, HPE’s modular data centres offer an impressive power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1  in contrast to the PUE of 1.3 to 1.4 typically associated with the best modern designs of traditional brick-and-mortar data centres.

HPE’s modular data centre supports the most power-demanding architectures, such as the HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000. It is well-suited for mission-critical and compute-intensive workloads, including supercomputing and generative AI. It enables scientists, universities, and enterprises to achieve faster outcomes.

Sue Preston, Vice President & General Manager of WW Advisory & Professional Services & Managed Services, HPE, said, “At HPE, we believe in the power of collaboration to create transformative solutions. Our partnership with Danfoss brings HPE’s innovative modular data centre with Danfoss’ groundbreaking heat reuse technology. Together, we are not just adding value; we are multiplying it. By harnessing the typically untapped resource of waste heat, turning waste into worth, showing the future of energy usage is efficient, intelligent, and, most importantly, achievable now.”

From chip to chiller: Driving innovation in decarbonisation

HPE has partnered with Danfoss as their decarbonisation partner to leverage excess heat. It is one of the largest untapped energy sources and the largest potential for data centres across Europe. The strategic partnership takes advantage of Danfoss’ extensive product portfolio of energy-efficient solutions to drive innovation. This will support decarbonisation and build the blueprint for the next generation of sustainable modular data centres.

HPE IT sustainability services

Data centre -heat recovery is inspired by how Danfoss uses heat reuse technology at its headquarters campus in Denmark. Here, the heat is recovered from Danfoss’ on-site data centre, boosted by a heat pump, and reused in surrounding buildings to provide space heating. The heat can also be fed into the local district heating network to provide a renewable heat source to residents. The reuse of heat is a major part of Danfoss’s decarbonisation strategy. It has helped Danfoss achieve carbon neutrality in the energy system of its 250,000m2 campus in Nordborg in 2022.

The new energy-efficient data centre solution from Danfoss & HPE offers-

•  Danfoss’ innovative solutions, including heat reuse modules that capture excess heat from data centres to provide renewable heating on-site and to neighbouring buildings and industries for various applications, and Turbocor® oil-free compressors that enhance data centre cooling efficiency by up to 30 percent.

• HPE’s scalable Modular Data Centre (MDC), in the form of small footprint, high-density (kW/rack) containers, can be deployed nearly anywhere in the total absence of heavy industry and incorporates technologies such as direct liquid cooling, reducing overall energy consumption by 20 percent.

The new scalable modular data centre leverages Danfoss technologies, including Turbocor® compressors for heat pumps and chillers, heat exchangers, heat reuse modules, drives and pump skids. These allow data centres to be cooled up to 30 percent more efficiently while recovering and reusing excess heat.

It is a modular solution with components that work together seamlessly and includes two technology stack options with a heat recovery system, including a hydronic heat recovery heat exchanger and water-water heat pump, recovering heat from an air-cooled edge-to-cloud modular data centre today and potentially second phase liquid-cooled HPC modular data centre.

Ms Anju Mary Kuruvilla, Director- Industry Affairs, Communication & Sustainability- Danfoss India, said, “As we navigate the data-driven era, sustainability is crucial for India’s expanding data centre industry,  which is expected to grow exponentially by 132 percent to ~10 billion USD by 2027. Danfoss  partnering with HPE as part of our holistic ‘Reduce, Reuse, Resource’ approach will help inspire more green data centres in the nation, with circularity and decarbonisation embedded in them.”