| Datacentre power
Hitachi Energy’s HyFlex™: the diesel engine killer
Data centres are among the applications envisaged for Hitachi Energy’s HyFlex™ fuel cell based hydrogen power generator, developed in partnership with Gothenburg based fuel cell manufacturer PowerCell Group (Volvo spin-out). It is described as an “integrated and scalable plug-and-play generator for temporary or permanent installation, where grid connections are impractical, and diesels are not an option.”
The medium-power variant provides power for temporary installations and is designed for 400–600 kVA.
The high-power variant caters to permanent installations and provides 1 MVA or more per unit.
Hitachi notes that HyFlex™ is “completely emission-free, producing only AC power, usable heat, and water.” For comparison, a 1 MVA diesel
Cooling supercomputers: a new role for old mines
A feasibility study, part of the Edinburgh Geobattery project, is underway to see if waste heat from the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility (ACF) can be stored in disused mine workings near the facility and used to warm homes.
The computing facility currently releases up to 70 GWh of excess heat per year. This is projected to rise to 272 GWh once the UK government’s recently announced next-generation Exascale supercomputer is installed there. The supercomputer cooling systems would be augmented to transfer the captured heat into the mine water – up to a maximum temperature of 40°C – which would then be transported by natural ground water flow in the mine workings, and made available to warm people’s homes via heat pump technology.
If successful, the £2.6 million study could “provide a global blueprint for converting abandoned flooded coal, shale and mineral mine networks into underground heat storage”, say the project’s instigators.
With a quarter of UK homes located above former mines, potentially seven million households could have their heating needs met this way, the researchers suggest. The Edinburgh Geobattery project – led by Edinburgh-based geothermal company TownRock Energy – is being spearheaded by industry and academic partners from Scotland, the US and Ireland.
The University of Edinburgh is the lead research partner on the project and is providing £500k of funding as part of its own net zero objectives.
Scottish Enterprise has awarded a £1 million grant to the project through the Joint
Right: The generic heat geobattery concept: recycling excess heat from cooling demand and using legacy mine workings to store and transport the heat to users down gradient
Programming Platform Smart Energy Systems (JPP SES) and Geothermica – two networks that have co-funded projects developing innovative heat and cooling solutions.
A further US $1 million from the US Department of Energy will fund researchers from the Idaho National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
University College Dublin, whose researchers are funded by Geothermica and the Geological Survey Ireland, and the University of Strathclyde are also project partners.
Edinburgh Innovations, the University of Edinburgh’s commercialisation service, will help make the research findings an investable proposition and support further funding applications.
Lead academic on the project, Professor Christopher McDermott, from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Geosciences, said: “This project opens up the potential for extracting heat stored in mine water more broadly. Most disused coalmines are flooded with water, making them ideal heat sources for heat pumps.” For further details about the Edinburgh Geobattery project, visit: Galleries to Calories (G2C) | The University of Edinburgh The project design is based around the need to provide a working prototype of up to 9 MW of cooling for the University of Edinburgh’s Advanced Computing Facility. The geobattery concept is that the cooling is provided using mine water in a closed loop heat exchanger at the surface, and an open loop heat exchange in the mine workings. Once this heat is distributed and stored in the subsurface, various heat pump technologies in different surface geographical locations can be employed to recover it.
Above: HyFlex™ fuel cell based generator
generator running at full load combusts roughly 225 kg of diesel and emits 720 kg of CO2
per hour.
Saft helps Microsoft go diesel free
Saft, a subsidiary of TotalEnergies, has delivered a battery energy storage system to replace diesel backup gensets at a Microsoft data centre in Sweden. The system can be seen as a key milestone on Microsoft’s path to diesel-free data centres by 2030. The new battery system results from a collaboration formed between TotalEnergies and Microsoft in March 2021 to drive towards net zero goals.
Until recently, diesel gensets have been essential for maintaining data centre power continuity in the case of a grid outage. Running generators for backup and testing was seen as an unavoidable source of greenhouse gas emissions.
The new Saft-supplied battery system provides four independent groups of 4 MWh, providing up to 80 minutes of back up. Saft deployed the BESS over 16 months, following Microsoft’s approach to data centre architecture. This focuses on safety and reliability by creating backup systems in groups that work independently to ensure a high level of redundancy.
As well as displacing diesel, the battery system helps to support grid stability and provides black start capability to support power grid recovery in the event of an outage. “Finding alternatives to diesel backup is an important step towards our 2030 goal to become carbon negative, and is integral to our 2050 goal to remove from the environment all the carbon that Microsoft has emitted since it was founded in 1975,” says Eoin Doherty, General Manager, EMEA, Microsoft Cloud Operations & Innovation. Saft delivered the battery system on a turnkey basis, with integrated power conversion and control equipment divided across the four independent groups. The scope included a total of eight Intensium Max 20 High Energy containers organised in the four groups, each capable of delivering a peak power rating of 3 MW.
www.modernpowersystems.com | January/February 2024 |
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