Brief
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, meant that the customer had to review its strategic approach to the replacement of its air conditioning systems. This led to the Senior Executives of the company challenging the market by inviting both existing contracted M&E suppliers and other non-contracted suppliers to tender products with innovation that would deliver step changing energy savings and de-risk some other issues at the same time.
Their air conditioning unit assets with refrigerant gases was 13,000 at the start of the project and over 50% of these units had past their nominal end of normal service life.
Solution
The solution was the Adiabatic Cooling Unit designed by Qe. 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.
Result
ENERGY SAVED
45,000 kWh
saved in energy per Adiabatic unit per year
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 equal to 5.13kW (based on actual compressor run hours per year). This represents 45,000 kWh saved in energy per Adiabatic unit per year.
COST-BASE
£50M
operational savings on energy consumption per year
With an energy tariff of £0.172 per kWh, the estimated total new requirement of 6,500 Adiabatic units will yield a total energy saving of 293 million kWh’s per year for the client, this equates to a £50M operational savings on energy consumption per year, once they have completed the replacement of 13,000 air conditioning units and replacing them with the 6,500 Adiabatic units.
The return on investment (ROI) is 2.48 years.
To date MJ Quinn Qe Solutions have installed 3,500 Adiabatic units for this client and saved a total of £70M in energy costs in period Jan 2017 to Jan 2021.
ENVIRONMENT
80,582 tonnes
carbon emissions saved between 2017 and 2021
The impact on the environment, carbon footprint and global warming have all been significantly reduced, the carbon emissions saved in the period Jan 2017 to Jan 2021 equals 80,582 metric tonnes.
