Innovation in Data Center Sustainability
A data center on the northern island of Hokkaido uses melting snow to cool the data center while using its waste heat to operate an eel farm. The project refers to this operating model as a "White Data Center" (WDC).
The data center is cooled by melting snow, accumulating snow piles in the winter, and cooling the data center by circulating antifreeze in the pipes from the snow piles to the data center, collected in the winter and used throughout the year. The company operating the project said that after being used to cool the data center, the temperature of the water is 33°C, which is ideal for eel farming.
According to Kota Honma, director of White Data Center, WDC's air conditioning uses 100 percent natural energy and does not use cooling methods or hot fuels that require electricity. Compared to the cost of renting servers in Tokyo, we believe we can offer our customers lower maintenance costs."
The cooling plan not only makes good use of the snow, but also solves a problem for local residents in Mibei, a city about 1,000 kilometers north of Tokyo where snowfall is about 8 to 10 meters thick each year and requires spending 400 million yen ($2.9 million) on shoveling and treatment.
White Data Center's Project Evolution
WDC was originally a project run by the city of Meibai, which is known for winter sports and snow. The region has been thinking about harnessing the cooling power of snow to cool data center cabinets, and first proposed using meltwater to cool computers in 2008.
In 2010, the city launched a project to cool servers with snowmelt water. In 2014, commissioned by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), one of the research and development institutions of the Japanese government, Meibai City actively "conducted research work, Develop an efficient heating system that uses snow and ice collected in the city for data center cooling and refrigerated storage, and recycles waste heat generated by servers." The White data center project took five years to test to prove that snow can be stored in winter and used to cool data centers throughout the year. The move saves about 20 percent on data center energy bills. Today, WDC has been spun off as a commercial project. The project, which began operations in April 2021, aims to build and operate zero-carbon data centers.
According to reports, the data center currently runs 20 servers, and a second data center is scheduled to open later this year, with a size of 200 servers.
Future Endeavors and Scaling Up of WDC
The cooling produces water of 33°C, which is the ideal temperature for agriculture and aquaculture. During its time as a research project, WDC explored a variety of agricultural options for this heat, including abalone, sea urchins, Japanese mustard spinach, cherry tomatoes and other products.
The head of the WDC project said in a press release issued by the government:
"The next data center we plan to build will be ten times the size of the current data center. To use energy efficiently, we are experimenting with vegetable farming and fish farming." And use the waste heat generated by the server in winter to grow seafood in the greenhouse. As we scale our data centers, we plan to make this a reality. "
WDC's research into snow cooling has borne fruit elsewhere. In the nearby city of Ishigari in Hokkaido, Kyocera has been building a renewable energy data center that will use snow for cooling. The idea has even proved useful further south on Japan's main Honshu island, where Data Dock has been using the technology at its Niigata Nagaoka data center in Niigata Prefecture.
Similar technology has been applied in other data centers globally. In Norway, Green Mountain uses warm water from its waste heat recovery at a lobster farm and also heats a trout farm.