Free cooling data centres for smart ports and shipping: an energy efficiency analysis

The IMO e-navigation concept as a systems engineering approach to digitalise the maritime sector contribute to harmonise the technology developments moving from the traditional (analogical) equipments to digital systems for ships and ports. Nowadays a modern triple E class ship exchange some 30TB of data per month between ship and shore (mostly via satellite links) and store about 2GB of data per day. All those data are handled by digital infrastructures first and foremost data centers. The paper introduce the digitalisation in the maritime domain and focus on data centers energy efficiency case studies with measurements data collected at different latitudes from the Mediterranean basin to the Arctic. The data center Free Cooling Technique (FCT) is also presented and analysed to optimise energy consumptions.