Digital Realty has announced that its water-saving initiative for cooling towers at its SIN10 facility has won the inaugural “Green Innovations: Water Solutions” award at the Singapore Environment Council’s 24th Singapore Environmental Achievement Awards (SEAA). The award recognizes businesses, groups, and individuals that have taken significant steps to drive innovation, reduce their environmental impact, and enhance the environment, society and economy in Singapore.
The first-of-its-kind in Singapore’s data center industry, the water-saving solution utilizes DeCaIon (DCI) electrolysis to eliminate the use of chemicals to treat blow-down water discharge – water that is drained from cooling equipment to remove mineral build-up – from the cooling towers in its chiller systems. This allowed Digital Realty to triple the number of times the same pool of water can be used at its SIN10 cooling towers, resulting in 1.24 million liters of water saved monthly. Monthly blow-down water discharge at SIN10 has reduced by 90%, while water usage efficiency (WUE) has improved by 15%, besting the Singapore Public Utilities Board’s industry benchmark of 2.6 Cu.m/MWh for data centers by 30%.
As a result of the significant sustainability gains from this project, Digital Realty is evaluating implementation of the solution across its global portfolio of 300+ data centers where applicable, to achieve similar resource efficiencies.
