Cold sea water to cool Mauritius

01 April 2010, afrol News
URL: http://www.afrol.com/articles/35835

Port Louis: The Mauritian government is joining the country's private sector in an exciting project to tap the undersea cold water to cool off operations by data centres on the island. Large resources are currently spent on electricity for cooling.

Announcing the move, the Mauritian authorities said the project, which is an alternative to electrical cooling, could save data centre operators millions per annum in cooling costs. The Managing Director of the Mauritian Board of Investment (BOI), Raju Jaddoo, said if implemented, this technology could down costs by over 50 percent for operators.

"The Mauritius Eco-Park is in the process of developing a system that uses sea water air conditioning to cool data centres. The concept taps deep water currents that bring colder water, utilising this instead of electricity to provide cooling," Mr Jaddoo said.

He said that to address the main project needs, a 212 hectares site has been acquired and the proof of concept has been developed.

"The Eco-Park will build a system of pipes that extend two miles offshore. The pipe system will run roughly 1000 metres beneath the surface of the ocean to allow it to tap into the much colder water. This cold water will then be transported back to the data centre complex and used to cool the data centres instead of electricity consuming coolers," added Mr Jaddoo.

Although the investment is relatively high, studies have shown long-term energy savings in cooling requirements of between 75 percent and 90 percent using this technology, which is not a novelty, but has not been adopted so far in a data centre environment.

Mr Jaddoo also commented on the recent laying of undersea cables which should benefit Mauritius and make the country a favourable data centre destination.

"With the new bandwidth capacity that is now available as a result of the current and future undersea cables, we foresee that Mauritius will have the same level of capacity as Singapore and Hong Kong by 2012," he said.