Energy 2020 Meeting to Show Off Some Cool Ideas

SCTE•ISBE said a case study showing how data center cooling techniques can be applied to cable system headends will be featured this week at the Energy 2020 plenary meeting in suburban Philadelphia.

The organization said the case study will discuss several of the “top 12” opportunities for energy savings identified by Energy Star, including technological advances such as using smaller fiber-optic interconnects rather than larger copper interconnects, and opportunities through back-up powering. The case study will also delve into the cost of heat removal from an air handling perspective, as well as by removing heat from the headend to other distributed portions of the plant.

The Energy 2020 meeting and plenary is set for April 18-19, at Comcast’s Chesterbrook, Pa., facility.

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The meeting stems from the broader Energy 2020 initiative, which targets a reduction in power consumption by 20% (on a per unit basis), a 25% reduction of energy costs (also on a per unit basis), a 20% optimization of the technical and datacenters footprint 20%, and a 10% reduction in grid dependency. Tony Werner, president of technology and product for Comcast Cable, and Balan Nair, EVP and CTO of Liberty Global are Energy 2020’s co-chairs.

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“While the continuing evolution of data center equipment has greatly improved capacity and performance, there has been an accompanying significant increase in power requirements and, therefore, the need to efficiently remove the resulting heat,” David Kozischek, manager, Applications and Market, Corning Optical Communications, who prepared the case study for the Energy 2020 plenary session, said in a statement. “Service providers are facing the reality that a new cooling architecture is required to extend the life of existing facilities and infrastructure, while enabling continued growth.”