Dave Williams, is the Senior Principal at PAE Engineers, he has 20 years of experience in mechanical engineering. Through his extensive work with data centers, laboratories, and healthcare facilities, he has turn into exceptionally expert at providing designs for controlled environments. Dave focuses on reducing operating and maintenance costs, and increasing energy efficiency. He counts Kaiser Permanente, Legacy, Tuality, and PeaceHealth amongst his long-term clients. A LEED Accredited Skilled, Dave has worked on many sustainable projects, including several LEED and Net-Zero Energy certified buildings.
PAE Engineers focuses on designing energy-efficient, high-performance data centers that prioritize sustainability and operational efficiency. Their work integrates progressive cooling solutions and advanced engineering to optimize performance while reducing environmental impact.
Can you’re taking us back to your first experience designing an information center? What was the project, and what were a number of the biggest challenges or learning moments you encountered?
The primary major was memorable and, truthfully, one in all my favorites. It was a conversion of an old semiconductor facility into an information center. That conversion, as you possibly can imagine, had multiple challenges, from repurposing the equipment to different operating conditions, adding resiliency, and ensuring proper operation with the reuse of apparatus was difficult. Commissioning was quite difficult as well, and ensuring all components, especially the cooling equipment and controllers, could ramp up quickly on an influence failure created some interesting and fun challenges to resolve. Ultimately, all of it worked great, and the team really bonded within the collaboration of many players to execute and switch over an excellent work data center facility.
How have data center design priorities shifted within the last 20 years? What are the largest changes you have seen in cooling, power distribution, and redundancy?
Priorities have shifted quite a bit. Data centers exist to supply a resilient, high-uptime environment for servers. As servers have turn into significantly more powerful and adaptable to environments, the facilities have modified. They’ve turn into very efficient, pushing the envelope of energy efficiency from the transformation and transportation of power to the racks, and the HVAC systems that provide a stable environment for the facilities to operate in have modified from large power-consuming equipment to progressive high-efficiency systems that allow for much lower PUE’s than ever before.
What are the largest challenges in designing data centers immediately? How do aspects like power availability, cooling capability, and stricter regulations impact design decisions?
The provision of reliable power is usually the biggest think about locating an information center. Land availability, proximity to fiber, security, and climate concerns all think about, but finding power appears to be an enormous driver.
How does PAE Engineers integrate sustainability into data center projects from the initial planning stages?
Starting with the top in mind is all the time an excellent reminder. Sustainability is a broad term that’s greater than just energy, but with the quantity of energy needed, that typically gets essentially the most attention. Setting goals for low PUE and sticking to that through the course of design is a guiding light and helps shape decisions. As noted before the goal of an information center is to power the servers. Every other energy used at the ability supports that and is where we would like to focus our efforts on reducing it. Cooling systems are the fundamental offenders on this, and starting there is absolutely where we like to start out. Considering the climate the ability shall be positioned in and optimizing the system to maximise free cooling and considering ways to avoid refrigeration systems with large compressor motors really helps the efficiency. Subsequent review of warmth recovery with support spaces from the information halls, water reduction measures, controls optimization, and even considerations like renewables and rainwater capture are additional items considered when designing for a high level of sustainability in the ability.
What are essentially the most promising innovations driving energy and water efficiency in data centers today?
As servers turn into more resilient and capable of handle warmer temperatures, the flexibility to extend the hours within the yr without cost cooling has really had an impact. For this reason, most of the data centers deployed now have a number of the most progressive and energy-efficient systems installed. Liquid cooling with more dense capability servers brings recent challenges and opportunities, as water has far more potential for large-scale heat transfer than air.
How do you balance high-performance computing demands with sustainability goals? Are there trade-offs when lowering PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) or water usage while maintaining reliability?
Not if done appropriately. The infrastructure must support the needs of the server racks with a resilient deployment, but when done thoughtfully, it may well be optimized to operate very efficiently, reducing the PUE and water consumption without compromising the compute’s performance demands.
What challenges do you face when implementing renewable energy, advanced cooling, or other sustainability measures in high-density data centers?
The challenges vary from project to project. Sometimes, there could also be local code or jurisdictional hurdles to beat, land is probably not available to deploy a certain variety of system, or truthfully, based on the price to implement an progressive design, the profit doesn’t justify implementing it. What works well for one climate or site is probably not the most effective for an additional, so each project should consider this.
How are AI workloads changing data center design? What adjustments are needed for power and cooling to support high-density AI racks?
Densification can affect each the ability and cooling systems quite a bit. Larger feeds, breakers, piping, etc., all supporting a far more localized power load create challenges, but in addition opportunities to rethink how the infrastructure must be laid out, positioned, and deployed in a way that’s secure, resilient and functional.
What role do you see AI playing in optimizing energy efficiency and real-time operations in data centers?
It is huge. The power to create a machine learning facility that deploys massive computing power towards the optimization of energy-consuming systems that serve not all data centers however the built environment in totality is gigantic. Peak shaving, understanding how each facility varies in its operation, and optimization on a selected case-by-case basis is a big opportunity. Rolling compute across multiple facilities in real-time with adjustment to various climate zones. I can only imagine how much AI learns in regards to the operation. The suggestions and optimization it could deploy would have a large effect on how the systems that serve these facilities may be adjusted and tuned.
What might the following generation of AI-driven data centers appear to be? Do you anticipate widespread adoption of immersion cooling, onsite renewable power, or fully automated facilities?
Continually higher-density racks are the trend and can likely proceed for just a few years. That densification creates interesting opportunities for the physical size of information centers with potentially smaller footprints, but in addition recent things to think about regarding infrastructure like larger breakers/piping, etc, needed for them. Immersion cooling is interesting and has been discussed within the industry for quite a while; immediately, it is just not as prevalent and never getting used much, but as densities increase, it might turn into more viable. Onsite renewables are all the time an ideal idea on any project, data center or not, but again, the price, ROI, viability of the location, consideration of the climate, etc., all have to be considered when deploying and choosing which variety of renewable and the way much must be installed.
