A leader in climate and sustainability, embedded in Trane Technologies' culture is creating comfortable, sustainable and efficient environments which don’t have a detrimental impact on the planet.
The company has evolved dramatically from its roots, which trace back to 1885. More than 130 years later, it is now a driving force in technology that back then couldn't even be dreamt of. It now employs more than 37,000 people worldwide and is a key contributor to the data centre space thanks to its industry leading air, liquid immersion, and hybrid cooling solutions which boost energy efficiency and sustainability.
Trane: Keeping up with data centre demand
“The change in our company of late has been crazy,” says Trane’s Global Director for Data Centres Danielle Rossi. “It's fascinating to me that I can have conversations with customers and they say the same words about the industry. There’s so much stuff happening, so much demand.
“In North America, for example, everyone's capacity is constrained in a certain sense.”
Here, Danielle refers to the boom of the data centre industry, which is growing exponentially thanks to rising customer demand for higher density. This is also propelling innovation in both data centre design and technology, spurred on by growing computing power.
She adds: “It’s fascinating to watch. A tonne of people sell tenant space but very few have available space. There’s only around 3% and that’s probably going to go down. Data centres can't be built fast enough.”
Chillers are Trane’s biggest player in the market, with its overall data centre expertise spanning back more than 25 years. But what’s changing now is scale.
Emphasising yet again the significant shift in the data centre industry, specifically toward larger-scale infrastructure, Trane is providing infrastructure for customers requiring a hundred chillers, where previously they would commission just a few.
“We're not building small widgets,” she continues. “We're building tractor trailer-size devices with hundreds and thousands of components. We’re having very different conversations than before.”
But it’s here that Danielle emphasises and draws attention to Trane’s other specialities and offerings, especially branching further into collaborative design to produce bespoke solutions to ensure maximum performance, efficiency and sustainability.
As well as this, Trane offers energy services, notably in the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) space. Experience in this field spans back more than 130 years to the company's origins in plumbing and pipe-fitting. It now also boasts one of the largest service organisations in the world, with more than 5,000 of its employees directly trained as service and/or control technicians, creating a massive global footprint.
Trane’s sustainability contributions
To ensure it walks the walk as well as talks the talk, Trane’s Gigaton Challenge aims to help its customers save a gigaton of emissions — a staggering amount — by 2030.
“We’re not only trying to increase our sustainability but help our customers to do it as well,” Danielle says. “It’s in a lot of our innovation. We have a lot of projects from an innovation standpoint that are all sustainability focused.”
Danielle has observed significant growth within her team since she joined in 2021 thanks to the heightened focus on meeting the needs of data centre customers. Trane's additional expansion into other vertical markets, like high tech and life sciences, has enabled the company as a whole to develop specialised expertise as they continue to grow.
“Yes, we've been in this space a very long time, but there’s some elements of our business we’ve ramped up and brought more into the spotlight,” she shares. “A lot of us are working on really specific parts of the market. We've grown up in them in some cases, so it gives us a little bit more of a specialised perspective that way.”
How Trane leads in the data centre space
There’s no getting away from Trane’s approach to sustainability, but this is also a key driver of its success in the data centre space. Trane’s leadership in cooling is thanks to a multi-faceted approach to sustainability. Its commitment to sustainability practices — including using repurposed steel in products — shows how its focus extends beyond individual products to encompass entire cooling systems, where optimisation and control play crucial roles in sustainability.
And although it does well, it knows it can always do better. This is underpinned by its dedication to research and investment in innovative cooling technologies. Through a holistic perspective and continuous research into emerging technologies, Trane aims to maximise the sustainability and efficiency of cooling solutions for data centres and other facilities it supports.
Trane's innovative capabilities and its comprehensive understanding also applies to energy systems. Its numerous patents for innovative technologies, paired with extensive experience, allows Trane to assess energy availability in various regions and assist customers in accessing stranded megawatts on the grid.
Its solutions like thermal storage help customers save energy and qualify for energy credits. Incentives provided by government programmes like the Infrastructure Reduction Act (IRA) in the US, credits encourage businesses to adopt energy-efficient technologies. By using Trane’s solutions like thermal storage, customers can reduce their energy consumption and potentially earn credits or financial benefits.
Danielle explains further: “In Europe there are a lot of heat recovery and heat reuse requirements. For example, Germany just put out one that requires a certain percentage of a data centre to be supported by heat reuse. This changes by year.
“So if the data centre is built in 2028, it'll be different than if it was in 2027. We offer heat recovery chillers, heat pumps and a lot of other different options. There’s a lot of opportunity to be sustainable in those aspects, especially when it comes to taking advantage of financial capabilities.
“This is something that’s really interesting but some people may not know we offer.”
As initiatives, regulations and facilities themselves vary depending on geography, Danielle and the team at Trane navigate the minefield of ensuring the best solutions are available to its clients to yield the most beneficial results.
Optimising performance and reducing downtime
Alongside sustainability credentials, one of the most integral parts of Trane’s business is ensuring its clientele’s facilities operate at optimum levels and keep down time to as near zero as possible.
Key to this, as Danielle explains, are HVAC controls, which ensure visibility into every component while optimising efficiency.
As data centres continue to increase in size, facilities are decked out with multiple chillers, further pushing how crucial it is to have controls that can coordinate an entire system to prevent issues like hotspots, especially during extreme weather conditions.
Danielle shares: “For example, London got to 40°C two summers ago and most data centres at the time were designed for a maximum of 35°C. That prompted a big problem because yes, the units overheated, but the units in the middle of multi chiller systems got very hot. How do you control that? How do you load shed, how do you swap between groupings? It’s really important to optimise operations day-to-day for efficiency, but during periods of extreme heat, it’s really important to optimise it so you don't have downtime.”
Trane emphasises service in general to mitigate any potential threats to data centre operations and to ensure efficiency. Without being on top of things, it can go south fairly quickly.
“If you don’t change the oil in your car, it’s going to seize at some point,” she adds. “Yes, it will work fine for however many thousand miles, but at some point it’ll start to not work as well. Things will start to break and then ultimately it will completely fail. Now there is more recognition that maintenance is so important.”
This is where the importance of predictive maintenance comes in, as it is significant in ensuring the longevity and reliability of HVAC systems. Predictive maintenance — which involves performance monitoring and equipment condition monitoring during regular operations — is crucial for addressing issues before they escalate into failures, preventing deteriorating performance and costly downtime.
How Trane collaborates to innovate data centre operations
Being in the business of optimising its customers’ performance, to ensure its own operations run smoothly, Trane has a vast ecosystem to support its work. Two noteworthy collaborators are LiquidStack — a next generation liquid immersion provider — and Crane — a data centre developer and operator focused on building sustainable, secure, reliable and scalable data centres.
Trane took on the challenge to explore innovative solutions to meet Crane’s strong commitment to sustainability, which includes maximising energy efficiency, minimising potable water use and reducing PUE. By engaging in collaborative design discussions and exchanging insights, the two companies identify opportunities to enhance efficiency and reliability in various applications.
“Crane is made up of an amazing group of people,” Danielle praises. “They're doing some really out of the box things. They have amazing ideas and we’re working on a bunch of patents with them. Their ideas are moving us forward in ways for holistic design for an entire complex system.”
Trane and Crane’s projects have resulted in the development of ready made solutions that address unique power demand and other challenges faced by multiple organisations needing access to more data storage.
Similar sentiment echoes with LiquidStack, with whom Trane collaborates to advance immersion cooling technology. Thanks to strategic investments, Trane integrates LiquidStack's innovative solutions into its own offerings, enhancing cooling efficiency and performance.
“We did a Series B in LiquidStack last year, learning a little bit more about that market over the last couple years and discussing the different technologies and what's being used,” Danielle says.
Together, Trane and LiquidStack explore new opportunities to tackle the challenges of GPU’s rising heat and higher rack densities.
By staying closely connected with clients within the mission critical cooling market, Trane can anticipate changes in the market and evolve their technologies and solutions accordingly.
“This isn’t a large industry,” Danielle explains. “It’s a large industry in size, but not in terms of the number of customers. We want to keep the best relationship with our customers as we can, but more importantly, we want to make sure that they’re fixing their problems and getting what they need.”
Trane’s bright future
From Danielle’s perspective, maintaining current strategies while anticipating and adapting to emerging trends and technologies is on the cards as Trane forges ahead to the future.
“We will continue to work with our customers in collaborative design to ensure we’re state-of-the-art and doing the things needed of us, specifically by our customers,” Danielle concludes.
“There's so much happening. Because of this, the team is growing. In the next 18 months to two years, there’s definitely going to be changes in the market. We’ll ensure we’re on top, and not just when it comes to product — controls, services and energy services, we’re going to optimise it as much as possible for customers.”
There’s no sign of Trane slowing down when it comes to providing high-quality solutions while embracing innovation and staying responsive to evolving market demands.
“There’s a lot of different technologies out there that are very interesting and there’s very specific applications. The people that want them, love them. Between new technologies and optimising existing technologies, we will make sure that we remain a leading solutions provider in data centre cooling.”
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