eOPTI-TRAX™ was recognized by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and put onto the fast track patent process for “green” energy technologies.
The expedited examination, recognition and approval by the USPTO highlights the need to bring this radically efficient, green technology innovation to the U.S. market in the face of increasing competition from other countries. Traditionally, it would take several years before a patent could be issued.
The International Energy Agency identifies building cooling systems as one of the areas with the greatest potential for reduction in carbon emissions. For example, the industrialized world uses 39 percent of its water to produce building cooling. The commercial sector in the U.S. alone uses 167 billion kW hours of power each year for building cooling. As water and energy resources become increasingly expensive and scarce, the need for more environmentally sustainable solutions is growing more urgent.
The new cooling technology platform can reduce water use by 80-97 percent in standard building and power production cooling as well as dramatically reduce the power consumed to cool the information technology and computing systems in data centers, which are notoriously hungry energy and water users. With the INERTECH cooling technology deployed in a data center environment, power usage is 180 times less than a traditional chiller.
INERTECH’s data center solution offers a clear return on investment through savings on energy and water, and is expected to create substantial growth in construction retrofits,” said Jakob Carnemark, Senior Vice President of Skanska’s Mission Critical Center of Excellence. “While this will create more green construction jobs, ultimately, the big winner is the environment.”
The highly advanced cooling system achieves a record-setting 1.012 mechanical Power Utilization Effectiveness (PUE) reading in repeated testing conducted by a leading research team from the University of Maryland’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. This unprecedented low reading leads the data center industry, where the average mechanical PUE for a facility is 1.4 to 1.6 and greater. “We continue to be amazed at what this game-changing technology continues to accomplish,”said Earl Keisling, CEO of INERTECH. “Even in the harshest climates in the world, it maintains its ultra-high efficiencies using 80 percent less water than traditional systems and can even be configured to use zero water, saving millions of gallons in the process, a natural resource that we believe is the ‘next carbon.’”
Inertech is focused on creating American manufacturing and construction jobs through environmentally focused innovation. Traditional chiller plants haven’t changed much in 90 years, leaving vast opportunity for any new technology that can offer significant improvements in performance.
Lloyd Switzer, Director of Network Transformation at TELUS, the first large commercial customer to deploy the eOPTI-TRAX system says, “Leveraging INERTECH’s technology, Skanska’s design has been able to reduce our data center Total Cost of Ownership by 40 percent. At the same time, we are closer than ever before to achieving our goals of environmental stewardship.”
