Our client, a major UK based telecoms company, was confronted with a multi-faceted challenge centred on their need for air conditioning at multiple sites. Pressures emerging on Global Warming due to CO2 emissions, new EU regulations on refrigerant gases, ageing air conditioning units with inherently high maintenance costs and the increasing cost of electricity, the Senior Executives of the company challenged the market by inviting both existing contracted M&E suppliers and other non-contracted suppliers to tender product innovation that would deliver step changing energy savings and de-risk some other issues at the same time.
Their air conditioning unit base was 13,000 and over 50% of these units were past the end of normal service life.
The solution was the Adiabatic Cooling Unit designed by MJ Quinn. The unit utilises external cool air by passing it across the heat generating equipment in a room and exhausting the heated air by product out, taking full advantage of the natural thermal gradient. The Adiabatic Cooling Unit draws in external air and passes it through primary and secondary filters. The unit mixes external air and internal air to maintain a constant temperature set point. The EC fan technology modulates the fan speed and air volume to give close temperature control. When the external air temperature gets too high to cool the equipment in the room, typically 26% of the year on average for the UK, clean potable water is passed over two pads that the warm external air passes through, a percentage of the water evaporates and cools the air leaving the pad.
The scale of the energy saving that the programme delivered when compared to traditional existing technology is quite staggering. An Adiabatic unit consumes 1kW of power to produce 30kW of cooling capacity, in comparison to a refrigerant based air conditioning unit that consumes 17.5kW of power to produce 30kW of cooling capacity.
The actual measured delta in powered consumption saved is 5.13kW (based on actual compressor run hours). This represents 45,000 kWh saved in energy per Adiabatic unit per year.
With an energy tariff of £0.172 per kWh, the 6,500 Adiabatic units will yield a total energy saving of 293 million kWh’s equating to £50M operational expenditure savings per year.
The return on investment (ROI) is 2.48 years.
To date we have installed 2,800 Adiabatic units for this client and saved a total of £37M in energy costs.
The impact on the environment, carbon footprint and global warming have all been significantly reduced.
At MJ Quinn we believe new projects should be undertaken with great amount of consideration, planning and research.
