Aquatherm PP-R piping creates leak-free chilled-water system for Arizona Public Power Utility’s pilot data center program.
PCs, laptops, tablets, smart phones, digital TVs — a great deal of energy is consumed connecting the public to the Internet. In fact, the information-communications-technologies ecosystem, also known as the digital economy, uses more than 1,500 terawatt-hours of power per year or about 10% of the world’s total electricity generation. Additionally, expending this major amount of energy on the World Wide Web produces a mountain of data to be stored. The International Data Corp. forecasts we will generate 44 zettabytes (or 44 trillion gigabytes) of digital data by 2020.
The leadership at Tempe, AZ-based Salt River Project (SRP), the nation’s oldest —and one of its largest — public power utilities, felt it was imperative they do their part to answer the big questions related to these problems: Where can we stash all of this generated data? And, in turn, how can we decrease the amount of energy used to contain it?