Assessment of energy saving and CO2 emission mitigation of low-lift cooling in computer hardware manufacturing industry: A case study in Thailand

Released heat from production process contributes the largest proportion of cooling load in computer hardware manufacturing industry. According to traditional design practice, chiller plant produces chilled water at a temperature of 7°C to treat the entire load from the production process and from the comfort air-conditioning in buildings. However, the heat from the process is solely the sensible component where high-temperature chilled water (e.g., 15°C) can be used for the heat removal, the chillers equipped with low temperature-lift technology thus offer a great opportunity to improve the plant’s cooling performance. Under the critical global warming situation and the need of decarbonizing industry, this paper investigated the energy saving and CO2 emission mitigation potential of the low-lift technology by which the chiller plant of high-temperature chilled water (15°C) is dedicated for the production process cooling, and the traditional chiller plant of the low-temperature chilled water is used to serve the building air-conditioning. The study site was a large factory of computer hardware manufacturing in Thailand. Through detailed energy auditing, the cooling load profile of the production process was established, and it was used to design the low-lift chiller plant. The annual simulation results showed that in our study case the low-lift chiller plant together with variable motor speed control had 31.6% higher cooling performance than the traditional chiller plant. The plant could reduce the energy consumption by 5,550 MWhelec/year. As the CO2 emission of the grid power in Thailand was 0.47 kgCO2/kWh in 2023 and it was expected to reduce to 0.35 kgCO2/kWh in 2050, the CO2 emissions from implementing the low-lift cooling could be reduced by 49,400 TonCO2 over a course of the 20-year project lifetime. The study results encouraged the low-lift cooling technology as a practical energy efficiency measure in computer hardware manufacturing industry. To our knowledge, while past research focused on the low-lift cooling in building air-conditioning, the study was the first potential assessment project of the low-lift cooling as a deep decarbonization technology for the computer hardware manufacturing industry in Thailand.