Potential of air-side economizers for data center cooling: A case study for key Australian cities

► Provision of low cost cooling for data centers is highly sought with the increase of cost of electricity and heat dissipation volumes. ► Many Australian cities enjoy cool and dry weather conditions during winter months. ► Data center operators can exploit these conditions by introducing outside air into their data centers and save cost of cooling. ► This paper evaluates the potential of using economizers for data centre cooling by analyzing hourly weather data of past 12 years. ► We identified that the capital cities in Southern states of Australia have sizable potential for using economizers above 60% of the time in a typical year.