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IPSWICH, UK BTs Sustainability Festival 2023 As part of its efforts to become a green telco, BT is exploring the use of liquid cooling solutions across its network and IT infrastructure, and, according to the operator, its initial trials with an abundance of partners suggest significant cost reductions could be achieved.

During its first Sustainability Festival, held at its Adastral Park research centre this week, the UK telco demonstrated some of the emerging technologies that, it hopes, will help it become net zero by the end of March 2031 and the majority of them are focused on ways to keep datacentre equipment cool, a challenge often cited by the whole tech sector as a major pain point.

While the fundamental technology is owned by the vendors of the solutions it had on display at Adastral Park, BT is engaged with them in terms of specific design requirements. Particularly noteworthy were two demonstrations of equipment being fully immersed in liquid. Branded by BTs team as revolutionary, the concept is based on taking any piece of network equipment, removing its fans, and immersing it in dielectric fluid that does not conduct electricity.

One of BTs liquid cooling solution partners is Immersion4, which is working on a trial to house servers in an immersion tank (see image, above). The companys founder, Serge Conesa, explained that Immersion4s technology can deliver up to 70% in energy savings as it focuses on cooling only the equipment, rather than the whole building (an approach he likened to chilling a bottle of champagne rather than cooling an entire venue).

In another showcase, BT demonstrated full immersion technology from partner PeaSoup Cloud that can save up to 20% in energy consumption (see image, below). BT explained that with this solution not only is there no need to cool the whole building but it means the equipment doesnt need to deal with excessive heat and is not put under strain, which results in longer-lasting components.

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BT plays it cool with new sustainability solutions - TelecomTV