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Venerable industry group can help you evaluate a move to immersion cooling

 DCD recent news:  By Peter Judge 

Data center efficiency group The Green Grid (TGG) has released a tool to improve the cost-effectiveness of liquid cooling in data centers.

The tool is designed for data center architects and finance professionals to evaluate liquid cooling options, which can save data center costs by up to 50 percent.

The TGG tool is available in both English and Japanese at thegreengrid.org.

Cooling is still a massive part of data center costs, and liquid cooling can reduce this a great deal, but data center builders have to choose from a variety of options including immersion cooling, and recent options such as two-phase cooling which potentially reduce costs even further. Liquid cooling also removes heat in the form of hot water which enables waste heat to be reused, encouraging a circular economy.

The TGG tool has been developed with contributions from industry leaders. It's the latest update to a tool first produced in 2016. The latest update is produced with an eye on ESG reporting requirements, which are pushing data center operators and owners to adopt best practices, as options like heat reuse are being encouraged.

"For seven years, The Green Grid has proudly collaborated to create, publish and promote financial and technical resources that enable more efficient design and promote sustainable change," said Erica Thomas, Leader of The Green Grid. "As data centers grow rapidly, access to the most efficient best practices for their performance is an important element to enable industry innovation."

“With approximately three percent of the world’s power going into data center environments daily, it is critical that the industry take accountability and responsibility for modeling more efficient data center designs. We are pleased to represent the work of dozens of contributors in this updated professional resource," added Rich Lappenbusch and RT Huang, representatives from Supermicro and co-chairs of the TGG Liquid Cooling Standing Work Group.

The Green Grid was set up in 2006 as a non-profit body and is best known for creating and popularizing the PUE (power usage effectiveness) metric for efficiency, which has helped drive years of work to reduce the energy used in cooling data centers.

In 2019, TGG was taken under the wing of the global tech association Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). Since then it has been involved in efforts by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to update its Energy Star score for data centers.

Meanwhile, a Chinese offshoot TGGC (The Green Gauge China) has published some of its own standards including a new IUE (infrastructure usage effectiveness).