2023-09-19 09:30:42
Neutral-IT has developed a system to cool computer servers by immersing them entirely in an oil bath. The heat recovered by the liquid is then used to heat domestic hot water in boiler rooms in residential buildings. The co-founder of this company tells us regarding his innovation.
Digital technology currently represents between 3 and 4% of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Concerned regarding contributing to the decarbonization of digital technology, Christophe Perron has always thought that it was absurd to use energy to absorb heat from data centers. He then looks for a solution to reuse it, with the constraint that this heat consumption must be approximately constant throughout the year. He identified that domestic hot water had this profile and developed a system to cool computer servers in building boiler rooms. Meeting with the president and co-founder of Neutral-IT.
Engineering Techniques: What system have you developed to reduce the energy consumption of your computer servers?
Christophe Perron, president and co-founder of Neutral-IT. Credit: Neutral-IT
Christophe Perron: We have developed a liquid cooling system which consists of completely immersing the servers in an oil bath. All the components (processors, graphics cards, etc.) will thus directly transmit their heat to this liquid which is then recovered by a water circuit which acts as an exchanger. The calories are then transferred to a buffer tank to preheat the water to a temperature of 45 degrees. This system, called a digital boiler, is installed in boiler rooms and is used to preheat domestic hot water in residential buildings. We therefore do not use any air conditioning system. In the summer, we may have to use a fan heater, when it is very hot and the residents of the buildings in which our servers are installed go on vacation. Since there is little hot water consumption at that time, we use this equipment, the same as the fan of an engine that can be found on a car, in order to extract the excess calories in the air.
A digital boiler installed in the boiler room of a building with computer servers immersed in an oil bath. Credit: Neutral-IT
There are no special precautions to take with oil, which is a good electrical insulator. Thanks to the absence of air, there is no risk of combustion, since oxygen is always needed for things to burn. The idea of using oil to cool components is not new since this liquid cooling by immersion already existed in the early days of computing, when transistors emitted a lot of heat. On the other hand, the way of implementing it, that is to say using oil to recover heat and then reusing it, is innovative and we have patented our system.
What are the advantages of your process?
Oil behaves as a very good thermal conductor, since we manage to recover 96% of the energy released by the servers. This heat then covers between 40 and 60% of the buildings’ domestic hot water needs, depending on the size of the boiler rooms. We are among the IT hosts with the lowest environmental energy footprint on the market, since we reduce CO2 emissions from our data centers by 113% compared to traditional installations. This result was quantified by Bureau Veritas and is also explained by the fact that only second-hand servers are installed. They have been reconditioned and their environmental footprint has already been amortized.
Unlike large data centers where several thousand computer servers are installed in the same location, ours are rather small (around ten kW), but installed in several locations. The day an outage occurs on a site, all other servers continue to operate normally, which allows us to ensure good quality and reliability of our digital service.
How many digital boilers are currently in service and is it easy to find new buildings?
We operate around twenty sites in Île-de-France, in Lille, Nantes and Lyon. It is easy to convince the residents of a building to install our equipment in their boiler room, because we sell them our digital heating system and then they benefit from free heat which allows them to reduce their energy bills. For the installation to be profitable, a minimum of 18 housing units are required in the building.
Then, customers who wish to host their digital data on our servers contact us for the eco-responsibility aspect. Questions around green IT are becoming more and more important in companies and they are increasingly concerned regarding their digital environmental impact. We have been installing our digital boilers for ten years and this gives us enough perspective to guarantee the reliability of this type of accommodation.
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