We are excited to share more about our work to maximize its reach and beneficial impact. This includes posts that highlight our thinking, resources that explain what we are building, and sharing novel datasets that we think can benefit the work of others.
Today, water basin stress appears to play little role in data center site selection. The distribution of locations with data centers and all global locations are well aligned, supporting the notion that developers are far more concerned with other factors.
However, regional water stress may become a more significant consideration over time as water stress in various regions increases 🥵 and the environmental impact of data centers faces greater public scrutiny 🧐.
If so, this could influence site selection strategies or drive shifts in the cooling technologies—for example, accelerating moves from water-intensive chillers, evaporative and adiabatic cooling toward air-cooled and direct-to-chip liquid cooling solutions in some locations, especially as rack densities continue to rise.
Stay tuned for future posts where we’ll look at the connection to factors as physical access to water and water tariffs.
Today, water basin stress appears to play little role in data center site selection. The distribution of locations with data centers and all global locations are well aligned, supporting the notion that developers are far more concerned with other factors.
Proximity to the grid is a make-or-break factor for data centers, driving key factors such as capital costs and time to market. So this tight clustering is no surprise—but how does it compare to other site criteria?
The Othersphere platform has the answer—bringing together dozens of spatial and time series data layers, to pre-model billions of projects, at millions of locations worldwide.
For those working on developing, funding, or utilizing data centers, this search engine for sustainable infrastructure saves time, reduces risk, and enables better decisions.
We’ll shortly be launching data center coverage within the Othersphere Explorer tool, and in advance will share dozens of similar posts that highlight the many criteria that enable high performance compute infrastructure.
Prior to launch we’ll release an ebook containing this insight series, offering a unique, data-driven guide to the ideal characteristics of world-class data centers.
Our data center module is currently in closed beta, but if you would like to be notified when this ebook is released—or request a demo today—we’d love to hear from you.
Proximity to the grid is a make-or-break factor for data centers, driving key factors such as capital costs and time to market. So this tight clustering is no surprise—but how does it compare to other site criteria?
At Othersphere we are constantly working to make it easier for our users to site, design, and vet infrastructure assets. For example, we recently integrated our Global Land Cost Model 🌍 , which estimates land values globally. This 5-tier ensemble model is trained on terabytes of data, considering factors such as infrastructure, land use, topography, population density, and GDP.
Included within our Explorer tool, this new data helps users more quickly assess one of the many (many) considerations that go into infrastructure developments. In this case, land cost can have a significant impact on project economics, especially for assets with large physical footprints and more modest hardware or operating costs.
Curious about the key factors influencing the results? The example SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) graph provides a breakdown of the six most impactful drivers for a rural landscape, highlighting GDP, population density, and water stress as important drivers of land value.
We recently integrated our Global Land Cost Model, which estimates land values globally and adds this new level of depth into results in Othersphere Explorer.
Equipment sizing and operating strategy LCOH optimizations for hydrogen electrolysis plants are cumbersome and time-consuming. It can take days to weeks to get the data, with each optimization run often taking hours. This limits analytical efforts to a handful of potential sites, leaving many opportunities unexplored.
The result — sub-optimal capital allocation and higher risks, with countless missed opportunities.The difference between initial cost calculations versus hourly optimizations can be dramatic, and highlights location as a critical element of project success.
Othersphere has revolutionized this process by combining the power of our underlying spatial economics platform with neural networks for dimensionality reduction and surrogate modeling.
Our global search engine now recommends pre-optimized projects in seconds, having already run an hourly optimization considering:
All of this is delivered through the Othersphere Explorer tool, which provides a novel, bottom-up view of potential hydrogen projects, evaluating key factors such as production costs, emissions, available offtakers, and fit with local surroundings.
Introducing the world’s first global optimizer for hydrogen projects
.gif)
Topography is one of the many variables within the Othersphere Explorer tool used to reveal and diligence optimal siting of sustainable infrastructure projects. To inform this analysis we use licensed data, open data, and novel datasets we have created or augmented. Our topography data is an example of the latter, where we built upon the exceptional work within the Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain Digital Elevation Model (MERIT DEM).
To make this sophisticated dataset even more accessible, we have introduced tiling to the MERIT DEM. Each tile offers detailed elevation and ruggedness data, enhancing usability for systematic geographical analyses.
We are excited to release this tiled dataset derived from MERIT DEM, adhering to licensing requirements and aiming to benefit the broader community working on topographical challenges. This data is provided as a parquet file (~4.5GB) and is access through Google Cloud Storage. Please click here to learn more about setting up a Google account to access the data and here to learn more about gsutil for downloading files. Alternatively, please contact explore@othersphere.io can we can work with you to determine other file delivery options.
Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain Digital Elevation Model (MERIT DEM) is a sophisticated dataset that addresses terrain issues common in other mapping efforts.
Ensuring sufficient market demand is essential for any infrastructure project, and hydrogen is no different.
But a key challenge facing project developers today is finding and engaging offtakers for lower GHG hydrogen, especially those willing to sign long-term offtake agreements.
At Othersphere, we're focused on simplifying this complex challenge. Our Othersphere Explorer tool is designed to empower developers by providing instant assessments of potential offtakers accessible from any project site around the globe, and how competitive various hydrogen production technologies will be in serving them.
Our tool currently models delivered prices to over 8,000 industrial facilities, including refineries, ammonia plants, methanol plants, ports, and steel mills (yellow points).
We are currently adding fuelling stations and airports (white points), adding over half a million emerging hydrogen demand locations.
We have a number of other offtaker types queued up for integration, and so please reach out if you have suggestions or simply want to learn about how we source and process this complex data.
If you're a project developer or offtaker navigating these challenges, we're here to help. Please reach out to explore@othersphere.io or schedule a demo to learn more.
Ensuring sufficient market demand is essential for any infrastructure project, and hydrogen is no different. But a key challenge facing project developers today is finding and engaging offtakers for lower GHG hydrogen, especially those willing to sign long-term offtake agreements.
Please reach out if you would like to learn more about Othersphere, our products, and opportunities to partner in accelerating deployment of high performance, sustainable infrastructure.
