data centers packed with million servers provide the backbone of the Internet, offering everything from cat videos to financial transactions to online gaming whenever and wherever you need them.
Given the importance of data centers, their operators, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google, go to great lengths to make sure there is always power available to keep them running. That means having plenty of backup power from diesel generators and batteries in case of power outages.
But tech companies are also committing to ambitious climate goals that don’t align with burning diesel from fossil fuels.
Microsoft has been working on cleaner alternatives and on thursday announced what it calls a “moon landing” for the data center industry: the successful demonstration of a large-scale generator powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
“Nothing existed like this before we started this research project and inspired fuel cell companies to really think about stationary power,” said Mark Monroe, principal infrastructure engineer at Microsoft, in an interview with GeekWire.
Hydrogen is generating increasing enthusiasm around the world as a versatile, clean-burning fuel. Microsoft developed the pilot project generator with power plug, a company specializing in fuel cells and hydrogen energy. The backup generator can produce up to 3 megawatts of power, which is enough to replace a diesel generator. The fuel cells are housed inside two 40-foot-long shipping containers.
Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft operates more than 200 data centers around the world, serving as hardware for its Highly profitable Azure cloud services.
There are plenty of reasons for tech companies to look to clean backup power, he said. sebastian mosschief editor of Data CenterDynamicsa London-based data center analytics provider.
“Getting off diesel would have multiple benefits beyond the basic moral imperative.”
“Getting off diesel would have multiple benefits beyond the basic moral imperative,” Moss said by email. “It’s easier for data centers to get permits because they don’t have to worry about [pollution] particles, and it means lower emissions for increasingly climate-conscious customers.”
Microsoft actually has a tool for customers to calculate your emissions based on Azure. And it set a goal for 2030 to become carbon negative, meaning it removes more carbon than it releases.
For the past four years, Microsoft has been testing smaller versions of hydrogen fuel cell generators. The company has worked in collaboration with researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado and Power Innovations in Salt Lake City. The newest project with New York-based Plug Power generates 36 times more power than its initial effort.
Microsoft officials say they’re also looking for more efficient and longer-lasting batteries. In addition, the company has a data center in Sweden that uses generators powered by more environmentally friendly diesel made in part from renewable raw materials.
The system developed with Plug Power uses what is called proton exchange membrane, or PEM, fuel cell technology. PEM fuel cells generate electricity and heat by combining hydrogen and oxygen. Its “waste” product is water.
The cells are powered by hydrogen that is created as a by-product in the industrial manufacture of chlorine and sodium hydroxide. This source is considered “blue hydrogen,” meaning the fuel has some climate impacts. Microsoft plans to switch to climate-neutral “green hydrogen” as its fuel, but is currently in limited supply.
Microsoft officials declined to say how many diesel generators it is using, calling it “well over hundreds.” Google has estimated that there are about 20 gigawatts of backup diesel generators worldwide, DatacenterDynamics’ Moss said.
But even at that level, the footprint is not gigantic.
“Emissions from diesel standby generators are a small part of operational emissions for many large data center operators, so the immediate climate benefits are likely to be small,” he said. George Kamiyaa Paris-based digital energy analyst with the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The biggest impact, Kamiya said by email, is the potential to expand this technology to sectors like hospitals that also rely on diesel generators.
“This, in turn, could have benefits for the power grid,” he said, “while also reducing emissions in the long run.”
But there are more hurdles to overcome before hydrogen fuel cells become a more widespread solution.
“Microsoft has been leading the charge on hydrogen, but [hydrogen] it doesn’t have the same energy density as diesel, so you need to use a lot more space to store the same amount of energy,” Moss said. “It also doesn’t have such a robust supply chain, so it can’t guarantee continued supply when its stocks run low.”
Microsoft officials agreed that there is a lack of suppliers for fuel cell hardware and green hydrogen. But there are so many potential applications that the hope is that the software and cloud giant can help create demand for the sector to spur its growth.
“That’s why this topic is interesting to us,” said Brian Janous, general manager of Energy and Sustainability at Microsoft. “Because way beyond this demonstration project, it’s really about how we support each other to help really accelerate the hydrogen economy.”