The energy consumption of data centers is enormous. According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report to Congress, the peak load on the power grid from data centers and servers is currently estimated to be approximately 7 gigawatts, equivalent to the output of about 15 typical power plants of 1,000 megawatts each.According to a report this week by IEEE Spectrum Online, IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory has announced additional details about a prototype system that can cut data center energy in half through an innovative process that cools computers with water and reuses the dissipated energy to heat nearby homes and offices. Bruno Michel, the manager of the advanced thermal packaging group at the IBM laboratory in Zurich, Switzerland, explained that the company's engineers had constructed a facility that reuses 85% of its generated heat while consuming only half the energy.

The goal of the zero-emission data center model is to reuse heat generated by computer chips for heating buildings, swimming pools, etc., or simply conducting the heat into municipal heating networks. An important requirement for the direct use of heat this way is that the temperature of the waste heat be above a certain threshold, which, for modern municipal heating networks, is about 120°F.

As reported by an IBM press release earlier this year, the first prototype of the zero-emission data center was demonstrated at this year's CeBIT trade fair, and was capable of reusing about three-quarters of the electrical energy needed for IT operation. This corresponds to a capacity to heat up to 70 homes, besides a 40% reduction in energy consumption for a typical 1-MW data center.

In addition to having an immediate ecological benefit, IBM's new water-based cooling system may make the most sense economically, especially if the new Obama administration goes through with its plans to levy new taxes on carbon dioxide emissions. According to the ProPublica public interest journalism site, Obama backs a cap-and-trade system that would put limits on carbon-dioxide emissions and allow utilities and other producers to trade carbon allowances, or credits, similar to the system that has helped reduce sulfur-dioxide emissions that cause acid rain.