Advansor Commissions 1.3MW Transcritical CO₂-Based Cooling System for New Kumo Networks Data Center in Spain

Advansor has commissioned a 1.3MW (369TR) transcritical CO₂ (R744)-based cooling system for a new data center in Valencia, Spain, which it said is the first in the country to solely use natural refrigerants.

The system consists of two industrial SteelXL transcritical CO₂ racks and three MiniBoosters. In addition to the 1.3MW of cooling capacity, the system also has 150kW (42.6TR) of capacity for air-conditioning. Advansor said that permanent magnet motors were installed on the system’s 12 compressors “ensuring 7–8% energy savings.” Other energy savings come from heat recovery, with the waste heat from the cooling process sold to a local district heating network.

The data center is 1,000m² (10,763ft²) and is operated by Kumo Networks. Kumo Networks company operates another data center in Spain and has committed to “using natural refrigerants and geothermal energy to minimize the impact of our activity on the environment.”

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The cooling setup: The new data center is air-cooled and uses nearby geothermal fields to cool the CO₂ refrigerant, which is designed to keep the system operating efficiently year-round.

• Italian heat exchanger manufacturer LU-VE Group supplied 34 evaporators, 64 dual-airflow evaporators and four angular air coolers to the project. 
• The system extracts hot air generated by the data center and direct cooled airflow toward the IT equipment racks.
• Construction on the data center began in February 2023.

CO₂ in data centers: ATMOsphere, publisher of NaturalRefrigerants.com, detailed the use of natural refrigerants in data center cooling in its recently published report “Clean Cooling for Data Centers.”

• While CO₂, propane (R290) and ammonia (R717) chillers and CO₂ CRAC (computer room air-conditioning) units are all in use in data centers, they represent just a small fraction of the sector’s cooling equipment.
• M&M Carnot is a leader in CO₂ cooling technology for data centers. It has manufactured CO₂ CRAC units for nearly a decade, the majority of which have been installed in Canadian data centers.