| Data centre power


and carbon terms), not adding to but actually reducing marginal emissions, helping shift from dirty fuels and enabling local micro grid development. In heat harvesting terms, CHP plants can provide high grade heat for domestic and commercial use.


Historically, there has been a reluctance in the


data centre industry to install combined heat and power. This has been partly due to an emphasis on short payback periods. Data centres prefer three-year payback periods, which was half that of typical CHP deployments. But this situation might be altering rapidly, driven by energy price volatility and changes in how the dollar value


of sustainability is defined by governments, customers and investors.


The sustainability case for CHP designs is already strong. This and the rapidly transforming economics of energy markets may combine to make CHP more financially attractive for data centres.


Rolls-Royce powers Romania’s hyperscale project


Rolls-Royce, along with its distributor partner Knopf & Wallisch (K&W), has supplied three mtu customised and containerised combined cooling, heat and power plants to Romanian cloud service provider ClusterPower for its new technology campus near Craiova, which will be the largest data centre complex in Romania and described as the “first hyperscale data centre in south-east Europe.”


The gensets are based on mtu 20V 4000 L64 FNER gas engines, and are said to be hydrogen- ready, offering the ability to blend 25% hydrogen with natural gas


as the fuel, and capable of using pure hydrogen in the future.


The 273 000 m2 campus will consist of five


Above: Visualisation of ClusterPower’s new technology campus, Craiova, Romania


datacentres, the first planned to be in operation in Q1 2022 and all scheduled for completion in 2025, with ClusterPower planning to expand its gas-fired generating capacity to 200 MW. Each data centre will have a power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.1. Interestingly, the plan is to use the gas gensets as prime power, with the main grid as backup, a “configuration that is currently rarely seen”, says MTU. Guided by ClusterPower’s requests, K&W developed a highly efficient system capturing most of the exhaust heat from the system with conversion chillers and transforming it into chilled air to cool the data centre.


A future for fuel cells


Caterpillar has launched a three-year project in collaboration with Microsoft and Ballard to demonstrate a power system incorporating a hydrogen fuel cell to produce reliable and sustainable backup power for data centres. The project is partially funded by the US DoE under the H2@Scale initiative and backed by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). The hope is to demonstrate a “1.5 MW backup power delivery and control system that would meet or exceed the high expectations set by current diesel engine systems.” It will be fuelled with low-carbon hydrogen.


As prime contractor, Caterpillar is providing the overall system integration, power electronics, and controls. Microsoft is hosting the demonstration project at a company data centre in Quincy, WA, while Ballard is supplying the hydrogen fuel cell


module. NREL is performing analyses of safety, technoeconomics, and GHG impacts. The demonstration will provide key insights into the capability of fuel cell systems to serve multi-megawatt data centers by providing uninterruptible power that supports 99.999% uptime requirements.


Meanwhile, Rolls-Royce and cellcentric, a joint venture company set up by Daimler Truck AG and Volvo Group AB, are taking the next step in their strategic co-operation on the deployment of cellcentric hydrogen fuel cell modules, with a focus on emergency back-up power for data centres. Rolls-Royce says it is among the world’s top three suppliers of emergency gensets for data centres and says, along with cellcentric, it is “keen to play a part in driving the fuel cell breakthrough”, convinced that the technology – and timing – are right for commercial launch. Each fuel cell module has a net power output of around 150 kW, and can be connected together to form scalable fuel cell power plants with outputs in the megawatt range, capable of providing clean back-up power for large data centers. Rolls-Royce commissioned a fuel cell


Left: Ballard Power Systems is supplying a 1.5 MW ClearGen™-II hydrogen fuel cell power generator for the demonstration project


Above: Microsoft’s data centre site in Quincy, WA, will host the demonstration project


demonstrator earlier this year and plans to bring a further demonstrator plant on line in 2022, based on modules providing approximately 100 kW each. The first pilot plants will be installed at customer sites in 2023, says Rolls-Royce, with the launch of standardised production fuel cell systems in 2025.


Operators of the very large data centres that handle telecommunications and internet traffic are considered a key customer group and the “market is growing rapidly”, says Rolls-Royce, which is “keen to enable energy-intensive data centres to substantially reduce their CO2


by making it possible for them to renounce the use of electricity generated from fossil fuels.”


www.modernpowersystems.com | March 2022 | 25


footprint


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49