The Power Protection & Management Supplement

Options: grid or not-grid

The electric grid is probably the most basic need for data centers today. But what if it is not available, or looks completely different?

We're not talking about shortterm outages. The world is seeing increased unreliability of the grid, but that's a topic for another supplement - on backup power.

What we are talking about is the fact that electrical grids are increasingly over-subscribed, and constrained. Power may not be available for a lead time of several years, or maybe never at all.

And even if it is available, utilities are finding it hard to get pylons to your facility.

Alongside that, data centers have a responsibility to reduce their carbon intensity. If your local grid can provide power at all, it may not be green enough for your net-zero journey.

On-site power?

Using on-site power seems like a more and more sensible option.

If you are the master of your own power destiny, with electric power on-site, you can ride out interruptions to the grid.

Moreover, you can even consider offering power to the grid, either through short-term interactions based on your battery storage, or longer term supply from your own capacity.

You can save money, you may be able to move to a lower carbon source, and - given that increase in grid instability -you may have

more peace of mind regarding the reliability of your facility.

But it's not easy to get to that Nirvana. Renewables on your site have the same problem they do on the grid: they don't match the curve of demand.

Storage with batteries is expensive, and other forms of storage, such as pumped hydro, are rarely available.

Nuclear is still years away, so some organizations wanting some measure of independence are making a carbon trade-off and opting for natural gas, a source that in many places is more reliable than the electric grid.

But what to do with the carbon? We spoke to someone with a plan for that.

And how about hydrogen?

Alongside those possibilities, the world is looking to hydrogen as a portable, energy-dense store, that can bridge the gap between intermittent sources, and constant demand

But the infrastructure to deliver hydrogen is still under development.

What will the hydrogen network look like? Surprisingly, it might look a lot like the systems which deliver hydrocarbons, After all, hydrogen is being touted to replace them.

To decarbonize, data centers may ultimately shift from electricity to something that looks a lot like oil.

That would be ironic.

by

How to build when the power isn’t there

Peter Judge Executive Editor

Around the world, data centers are often finding they can’t get access to the grid power they need. How do you build a data center in those circumstances?

In recent years, Singapore , Amsterdam , and the Dublin area in Ireland have instituted partial or complete bans on new data center projects. This has been driven partly by fears that uncontrolled development of data centers may use excessive amounts of energy, or else operators will buy up so much renewable power, that not enough is left for the country to decarbonize sectors such as heating and transport.

In Ireland, data centers use around 10 percent of the available electricity, and they preferentially buy renewable power. In 2022, Ireland’s Commission for the Regulation of Utilities (CRU) announced that there must be limits to data center building until 2028, or the country could not build renewable capacity fast enough to meet other needs, including a commitment to decarbonize the grid so that 80 percent of the nation's electricity must come from renewable sources by 2030.

All too often, utility grids can’t provide power when you need it. Data centers are increasingly looking at alternatives

In Singapore, data centers use seven percent of the available capacity, and potentially derail decarbonization ambitions because 94 percent of the country’s grid is powered by fossil fuels.

Even outside these areas, the power demands of data centers are likely to exceed the grid providers’ ability to deliver energy when it is needed. In Virginia, Dominion Power shocked the industry by saying that it could not meet data center power demands in the world’s biggest data center hub, delaying projects by years.

Meanwhile, in West London, it was reported that new housing projects could be banned till 2035, because data centers had bought up all the available connections.

Supply and demand

“There's an exponentially increasing demand for power due to the advent of AI and machine learning,” Jeff Gyzen, mission-critical facilities lead at the US architecture and engineering firm Arcadis, told a DCD panel this year.

“Right now at some of the hotspots, you can expect three to five years before power can be delivered to a site. That's a big problem, because data centers can't wait for that timeframe. In addition, the cost of the power is increasing too, so we're getting costs upwards of 24 cents per kilowatt hour.”

It’s a supply chain problem, says Bob Salter, an energy consultant and professor at Sonoma State University in California: “Supply and demand are out of whack.”

Salter’s home state of California has been aiming for energy efficiency since it brought in the “Title 24” energy code, in response to the 1970s energy crisis. In some ways that has worked too well, he says.

“The Title 24 approach was adopted, and we stopped building power plants. California generation capacity today is lower than it was 20 years ago, and US generating capacity is flat, with coal and nuclear being replaced with renewables.”

Global demand for electric power

is expected to grow by a massive 50 percent in the next 20 years, as heating and transport are decarbonized, by shifting from fossil fuel to green electricity.

“Data centers are expected to grow from three percent to four percent of total global power demand in that timeframe,” says Salter, “and things like vehicle electrification are increasing competition for electrical energy.”

The problem, he says, is plain: “A data center is a one to two-year build cycle and electrical energy availability is three years to none.”

The distribution problem

Data centers tend to demand high concentrations of power, in some places like Northern Virginia, where it's physically difficult to get the transmission lines in - so there's a distribution problem as well as a supply problem.

“Distribution is absolutely a problem right now because of the degrading electrical infrastructure,” says Gyzen. “We can't get it to where it’s needed because it takes time to build that distribution network. Those transmission lines and the existing lines are in need of repair, especially in the East Coast where that infrastructure is a lot older and so it essentially equates to an unreliable grid.”

The unreliable grid is more than an inconvenience. It means that data centers still need UPSs, batteries, and generator backups, which compound the emissions problem of the facilities.

The generators need testing regularly, but more concerningly, if extended outages become normal (California has warned of 96-hour breaks in power) then data centers using their own fossil fuel becomes normalized.

Duck and cover

California now gets between 17 and 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources, but it could get more from existing solar and wind farms.

They produce power in a “duck curve” at different times of day that

doesn’t match the curve of demand. This means there’s a further five percent of its power needs that California could get from renewables, but is rejected or “curtailed” because the demand isn’t there.

“We have a curtailment issue, which reduces the usable capacity,” says Salter. “And we're building very large grid-scale solar plants - so that curtailment number is going to increase.

“Traditional backup systems really don't solve the problem at all. And public policy has not necessarily evolved in a manner that is going to help us solve our problems.”

The five percent curtailed suggests a simple equation. It’s around the level of the total power needed by data centers. If that power could be stored, might that be the answer?

Gyzen has worked with battery energy storage systems (BESSes), installing a 400MWh capacity system in Long Beach, California. These can shave the peaks off the mismatch between supply and demand.

“Basically, it helped peak shaving for the utility,” he says: “It allowed the utility AES to take two of their generators offline. This type of technology is starting to spread across the US to assist in utilizing those renewable energy sources.”

Gyzen says curtailed power is “a drop in the bucket” in addressing the whole problem (not just data centers’ needs): “Every little bit helps, there’s got to be other solutions, and we need a multiprong approach to solving the shortage of energy.”

Salter says the data center industry should step up to a role in helping shape public policy - by encouraging openness to all the power options that industry has to offer.

Given the issues of supply and distribution, the sector also needs to start providing its own power, preferably on-site.

Local power acts as backup for problems in the grid. A microgrid on site can also potentially take the facility off the local utility’s responsibility

reducing demand at key moments.

And finally, having local power generation can provide active support, with batteries or other energy sources providing power out onto the grid when needed.

Other tools in the belt

Any onsite power will have to fit into decarbonization strategies. Alongside BESSes, there are other technologies that can play this role in data centers. None of them are perfect.

“We've got a lot of potential tools in the toolbox, and there are roadmaps for all of them. Some of them are longer term, some are shorter term, and we're going to need them all. We need to be looking at the immediate future, and the future 10 and 20 years out.”

Salter continues, with a sigh: “If we had done that 10 years ago, we'd be in a different place right now.”

Renewables

Solar power and wind farms are an obvious answer, and big players are busily funding new capacity on the grid through power purchase agreements. That capacity is remote, and doesn’t address the issue of reliable power on site - and there are problems with considering conventional renewables for this role.

“The surface area required to produce 200MW is huge,” says Salter. He is not wrong. The US National

Renewable Energy Laboratory reckons on about six to 10 acres per MW, a figure which is highly fluid, given changing solar energy availability. A 200MW solar farm would cover a couple of square miles.

“We build multi-tenant data centers near metropolitan areas to reduce latency.” In something of an understatement, he says: “And it's tough to put solar and wind farms onpremises in those areas. You can't do it.”

It’s possible to adjust the location of the data centers, putting them closer to transmission lines, or improving communications technology to mitigate the latency.

“That's one of the solutions that's in the toolbox,” he says.

Hydrogen

Hydrogen is a possibility, either burnt in turbines, or consumed in fuel cells. There have been proposals for hydrogen-powered sites, including a 1GW campus proposed by Fidelis New Energy in West Virginia.

The Mountaineer GigaSystem would be powered by fuel cells, using hydrogen created in an onsite electrolysis facility.

Outside of megaprojects like this, as we explain elsewhere in this supplement, the infrastructure to deliver hydrogen is still being developed.

Salter doesn’t see it happening

soon: “In the long run, in order to meet sustainability goals, we probably are going to have to have some shifts to hydrogen, but that's certainly not in the immediate future.”

Nuclear

Likewise, nuclear power is a prospect, being led by outlying pioneers. Green Energy Partners (GEP) is planning to use one of the first commercial small modular reactors (SMRs) in the US to power a campus of up to 30 data centers next to the older Surry Nuclear Power Plant in southwestern Virginia.

This plan will take a long time to come off. The first facilities to move in will take power from the existing nuclear grid, while GEP works on a deal with one of several emerging players offering SMRs, which are supposed to be more practical than older giantsized reactors.

Once it is up and running, GEP says it will produce more than enough energy, and will share some of the surplus in the form of green hydrogen.

But nuclear power plants are notoriously slow to permit and build. Even the smaller SMRs will face hurdles, as they have not yet gone through any permitting processes.

“Nuclear power is going to take years,” he says. “We developed means of dealing with the waste issues 30 years ago, but there's a long timeline for any path to nuclear solving our problems.”

Cutting loose

Whichever energy source they use, data centers will increasingly cut themselves loose, says Gyzen: “There's been a movement to isolate from the grid, until the utilities can catch up with all this demand. If you do it right, it’s actually extremely beneficial to the environment with the potential for net zero emissions.

“Quite frankly, even if there wasn't the delay in getting the power right now, this is actually a better solution. It's a greener solution. And it's a cheaper solution, because you're saving power costs. I just don't see why you wouldn't do it.” 

NATURAL GAS… AND CARBON CAPTURE? NOT SO SIMPLE

IIn some cases, developers are shifting to whatever is practical. Jeff Gyzen is involved in a 200MW project in Northern California, which has been pushed to use natural gas due to a lack of power, but he aims to mitigate some of the admitted carbon emissions of that gas.

“It's basically a result of the availability of power being delayed three to five years,” he says. “It's a fuel cell solution, and this will be completely detached from the grid, so we're not concerned with the grid reliability.”

Starting from that premise, he says, “we're basically masters of our own destiny.”

Hydrogen would be the best input to the fuel cells, because “there's literally no emissions,” (as long as it’s green), but in the meantime the project will use natural gas.

Burning natural gas produces water, and carbon dioxide - at about the same carbon intensity as the local electricity grid, Gyzen says. “From a carbon footprint perspective, it's not the best solution.”

The approach saves money, delivering power at around 14c per kWh through a power purchase agreement (PPA), instead of the utility rate of around 24c. “For a 200MW, campus, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars in power savings.”

The project could have as much as 8MW of extra redundant power. “We won't be using that unless there's a situation that comes up, so we're planning on pumping that power back into the grid. Not only are we not taxing the grid, but we're actually propping it up.”

The gas grid is good enough for four nines of reliability (99.99 percent uptime, or less than one hour’s downtime per year), which is good enough, says Gyzen: “A typical data center likes to have five nines reliability, and they achieve that through UPS systems and generator backup. In contrast, we eliminate all the generators

and UPS systems, and the reliability doesn't suffer that much.”

The natural gas does have emissions, but Gyzen plans to sequester at least some of that: “We are using a greenhouse to utilize that CO2 ” he says. “Plants love CO2 They thrive on it.

“In addition, that produce can be sold. We will have a small retail center adjacent to the greenhouse that will actually sell that produce to the local community.”

The exhaust from the fuel cells first goes through absorption chillers. “The exhaust on these particular fuel cells is about 350°C,” says Gyzen. “That's ideal for absorption chillers. So we anticipate that we'll be able to produce chilled water to cool at least 50 percent of the IT load in this data center.”

After that, the exhaust is at an “ambient type temperature,” and can be pumped into the greenhouse.

Gyzen says he has plans for a 40,000 sq ft vertical farming greenhouse: “There are limits. The campus is small, it's in Northern California, so it's not a sprawling 100-acre campus. If it was, we would definitely increase the size of the greenhouse. I would love for that to be triple, quadruple that size, because you could sequester a lot more."

Sadly, however, DCD’s calculations suggest that greenhouses can only sequester a tiny proportion of the carbon in such a setting.

Greenhouse owners do use added CO2 to stimulate growth in greenhouses, and it has been proposed as a technique for carbon capture, with impressive results.

Increasing CO2 concentration from 400 to 1,000 parts per million can increase vegetable yield by up to 60

percent, according to research by scientists from China and Canada. A paper by Jie Bao of Fuzhou University and others found that around 100 tons of carbon could be sequestered each year by 1,000 sq m of greenhouse. That is 40 times higher than the sequestration of a natural forest.

These figures suggest Gyzen’s 40,000 sq ft could sequester perhaps 400 tons of CO 2 per year.

Sadly, the amount of CO 2 produced by the campus will be a great deal more than this. A campus generating 200MW continuously with natural gas would consume 1.75 million MWh per year.

Producing this from natural gas would produce 350 million kg, or 350,000 metric tonnes (380,000 US tons) of CO 2 per year - since natural gas emissions are around 200kg per MWh

Gyzen says he hopes to bottle CO 2 to ship to other growers, but the site’s own greenhouse would apparently only catch around 0.1 percent of the carbon produced by its fuel cells.

“Unfortunately, our greenhouse size is constrained by the physical area limitations of the site,” Gyzen says. “We do however have plans to sequester the balance of the CO 2 in our goal for a near net-zero data center, but I cannot go into more detail regarding those plans at this time.

"This project will be a proof of concept that we hope will establish a new paradigm for data center designs going forward.”

Critically, however, any carbon from the natural gas that is sequestered in plants will then find its way into the atmosphere, so sequestration is rather short lived. 

Power challenges

center operators and utilities achieve their sustainability goals, but it could also turn under-used assets into revenue generators.

The technology behind it and the services (and revenue streams) it could open up are explored in detail in the Vertiv white paper, How to maximize revenues from your data center energy storage system with grid-interactive UPS.

Data center power is a perennial issue. Indeed, with 2,000MW of colocation data center capacity being added every year across the world, it’s one of the biggest issues for data center operators

Those challenges often start before a data center is even operating, with the acquisition of a connection from the utility. But on top of that are the demands of sustainability, achieving highly ambitious Net Zero targets, and keeping up with demand from expanding clients, which all remain big, everyday issues.

Those demands are at the heart of the challenges that data center operators face when it comes to their power infrastructure, but they manifest very differently in terms of the power hardware that is being installed today.

“The biggest challenge we see with power density (and the need to increase power density) is to have power building blocks that allow higher capacity and occupy less space,” says Arturo Di Filippi, global offering manager – Smart Power, at Vertiv.

“The second big challenge is related

to energy efficiency and, hence, running costs. Power equipment needs to work continuously for 365 days per year so even a very slight improvement in efficiency will prove valuable for the end user in terms of reduced operating costs.

“This is driving a challenge on our side to improve our product offerings so that we can offer the highest efficiency for customers, as well as different operating modes that can support particular scenarios,” says Di Filippi.

The third is less of a challenge and more of an opportunity, he says - one where you can use equipment in a ‘smart’ way. “As we no longer have the kind of grid outages that we had in the past, this frees up UPS or battery systems to provide grid services.”

Special services

While the first two challenges highlighted by Di Filippi are nothing new – buyers expect suppliers such as Vertiv to make incremental improvements in density and efficiency with each passing generation – the idea of using data center assets to provide revenue-generating services to the grid certainly is.

Not only could it help both data

The need for such services has been driven by the adoption of highly variable renewable power, creating a major headache – and cost – for utilities keeping their grids balanced. The concept is simple: batteries sit idle most of the time. So why not utilize just a fraction of their power, providing a small amount of capacity back to the grid, on demand?

This can help grid operators balance the grid, cutting their costs, on the one hand while providing a new revenue stream for data center operators on the other.

“A grid-interactive UPS with a properly sized energy storage system can easily provide a fast-enough response to meet the needs for frequency containment, support a variety of income-generating services, and allow cost-saving opportunities through demand management,” explains the white paper.

Increasingly, these capabilities are being built into UPS systems from vendors like Vertiv, while the management software enables data center operators to determine how much power is required to safeguard the critical load and, when redundant, how much they devote to grid-balancing services. For example, to dial grid services down when conducting tests on power backup infrastructure.

However, Lithium-ion UPS batteries are recommended to take advantage of these services. VRLA batteries are not the best option.

Power density, efficiency, and making the most of the latest smart features are the key challenges data center operators are facing today

Satisfaction guaranteed

But what about power density and efficiency? How is power equipment being improved in order to satisfy the demands of data center operators and their clients?

Power density can be increased in two different ways, says Di Filippi. The first is to use smaller power equipment but in parallel. “When, say, we’re asked for a 2 MW power block, we may use two 1 MW blocks or any other combination, depending on the footprint and the requirements of the customer.”

The second is to get more power by improving the UPS hardware and components so that they are capable of handling more power. Vertiv is looking to new materials and technologies to keep ahead of this transition.

In terms of operation, a Vertiv UPS will offer a number of modes of operation, including modes intended to make it easy for non-specialist staff to manage for use in remote locations, such as Edge data centers.

There are three different modes of operation. The first is double conversion (VFI), where the rectifier and inverter are active. However, the double conversion required to achieve that does affect efficiency.

The second operating mode is the Eco mode, which can be used when data center operators can be absolutely sure about power quality – skipping the conversion in the UPS and using the static bypass. In plain terms, this bypasses the UPS but guarantees the highest efficiency because the unit isn’t being used to ensure power quality.

The third operating mode, which is relatively new to Vertiv’s line-up, is the dynamic online mode or VI mode. “You are basically flowing the power through the bypass, but the difference is that you keep your inverter active and use it to ‘clean’ some of the harmonics and improve the power quality,” says Di Filippi.

This offers the efficiency benefits of the Eco mode, while at the same time providing some improvements to power quality and enhancing system reliability.

Coming soon

All that is nothing compared to some of the revolutionary shifts coming soon. These include on-site micro-generation and microgrids that could also supply power back to the electricity grid, as well as new battery technologies.

While Vertiv doesn’t supply diesel or

gas backup generators, Di Filippi has seen an increase in the use of Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil (HVO) as a sustainable alternative to diesel. HVO is biofuel based on waste animal and vegetable oils, typically from the food processing industry, but also encompassing oils from non-food grade crops.

On their own, vegetable oils can’t be used as fuels, but via the process of hydrotreatment, which removes oxygen from the oils, they can be turned into hydrocarbons capable of running in diesel engines. The process produces a significantly more stable fuel compared to the plant-based material added to biodiesel, making it more stable and performant.

But more exciting than that, perhaps, is the development of new battery technologies that could run data centers for an extended period – not just the time it takes for the operator to spin up

emerging technology that has benefits in terms of safety and recyclability compared to Li-ion products is nickelzinc. Vertiv expects that both lithium and Ni-Zn batteries will gradually replace VRLA for most of the critical applications soon.

Moreover, nickel-zinc batteries’ lifecycle carbon emissions are many times lower than both lead acid and Li-ion, contain no volatile organic compounds, and are easier to recycle.

So, while there are certainly multiple challenges in the provision of power – especially with data centers’ ambitious Net Zero goals – there are also some exciting solutions that can be implemented now, with others coming shortly.

>>Learn more: vertiv.com/gridsupport

their backup engines – as well as offering environmental benefits.

“This comes back to power density,” says Di Filippi. For example, current Li-ion batteries offer greater energy density than conventional lead-acid; consequently their usage is widely increasing in data centers. A new

Arturo Di Filippi

Preparing for the hydrogen grid

Hydrogen is going to be a big player in the zero-carbon economy the world needs. But we need to understand what it

does and how it will be used.

“Green” hydrogen can be produced from water by electrolysis using renewable electricity. It can then be stored - in tanks or chemical compounds. It can be transported through pipelines, or else it can be liquefied and carried by road and sea in trucks and tankers.

When energy is needed, hydrogen can be burnt, or reacted in fuel cells, to provide electricity. The only by-product is the water we started with.

but, of course, you lose some energy in the process.

Electrolysis is 80 percent efficient, but oxidizing the hydrogen in a fuel cell may only give back less than 46 percent of the energy put into the electrolysis.

If you are just putting energy in and getting it back out later, with a rather inefficient round trip, why bother with hydrogen? There are two reasons.

Firstly, most renewable energy is intermittent. The sun doesn’t shine at night, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. If electricity demand is low, a solar farm will have to be switched off, even if the sun is shining.

installations, and in 2020, it curtailed around five percent of its renewable energy output, amounting to 1.5 million MWh. For context, that is equivalent to around 170MW of power.

So you need storage. And if you are going to store energy, then hydrogen has some important advantages over batteries.

It has an energy density of around 33 kWh per kg, which is more than a hundred times that of Lithium-ion batteries (which hold around 0.26 kWh/kg). It’s also three times as much as gasoline or natural gas.

Effectively, hydrogen is a means to store renewable energy. When you use it, you get back the electricity you put in -

In developed markets, more than 1.5 percent of the possible output of renewable sources is “curtailed” in this manner. Unless there’s a way of storing that energy, the amount curtailed will get larger as more renewable sources come onstream, and go off the scale when they replace fossil sources.

California has a lot of solar and wind

The efficiency is expected to increase as processes are improved, with some operators claiming to approach efficiency in the 90 percent region.

That’s why hydrogen is often considered a replacement for various hydrocarbon applications, including transport.

First users

Because it’s portable and has a high energy density, hydrogen will first be used

We have heard how great hydrogen will be as an energy source. But how do you get it?

Peter Judge Executive Editor

in transportation, driving vehicles too large to be powered by batteries.

A truck might have a 50,000kg payload, and carrying 20,000kg of battery would reduce that substantially. And charging times for the battery would make it less effective as part of a logistics network.

“If it takes a day and a half to recharge that battery pack,” says Mark Monroe, of Energetic Consulting. “Instead, you can just add a few high-pressure hydrogen fuel tanks, run a hydrogen truck over that same route, and carry more payload, rather than carrying batteries.”

Hydrogen companies are already providing systems for this application. Hydrogen specialist Plug Power has produced a green hydrogen facility for commercial trucking in Southern California, which uses two 5MW electrolyzers to provide two tons of hydrogen per day, which can be fed to trucks.

Monroe was formerly at Microsoft, working on hydrogen applications for data center power, but he admits that vehicles will use hydrogen first: “Transportation is going to be much, much larger than the footprint of data center usage for a long, long time,” says Monroe.

Even for smaller vehicles powered by batteries, hydrogen could have a support role: “One of the most important applications for hydrogen could be in electric vehicle fast charging stations.”

Fast charging stations in remote areas have to store energy to charge cars up fast. Companies including General Motors and Plug Power have developed containersized energy storage units, which contain hydrogen fuel cells.

Plug’s system has an 18,000-gallon liquid hydrogen tank and a megawattscale fuel cell system that can provide over 60 megawatt hours (MWh) of energy quickly – enough to fast charge more than 600 electric vehicles.

“They can get the DC power that's needed, they can get the high voltage, they can get the high currents that they need - with no connection to the grid,” says Monroe.

“Putting a fast charging station at a convenience store or a truckstop becomes much easier. You just drop a container down in the parking lot, and cars can get an 80 percent charge in 15 or 20 minutes and pay in the store. And once a week or every few days, a hydrogen tanker comes by and refuels the container.”

For the minority of hydrogen vehicles, the same system could have a tap to take

hydrogen directly: “That might be a way to start expanding the hydrogen vehicle fleet as well. Electric vehicle chargers will come first, and then the hydrogen cars will take their place where they're needed, for people who do long trips.

Alongside transportation, he thinks hydrogen power in data centers will eventually expand quickly: “As soon as products are available, and as soon as hydrogen is available, people are chomping at the bit to try and get things going.”

Several data center operators are looking into hydrogen very seriously, although the switch over from diesel is not completely straightforward.

Gas storage takes a lot more room than liquid diesel tanks - and hydrogen can be tricky to handle. It's the smallest atom in the universe, and H2 molecules are tiny. This means that pipes and tanks require a high specification to prevent leaks. And hydrogen gas distribution, as we shall see, is in its infancy.

Despite this, Microsoft is leading the way, testing a variety of ways to consume hydrogen at its facilities (see Box).

Data centers could be pushed to take up hydrogen faster, if diesel power becomes a risk factor for new data centers. For instance, Maryland recently denied exemptions for 504MW of diesel generators that Aligned had applied to place on a plot within Quantum Loophole’s giant data center park.

Monroe thinks that this sort of decision means a lot of businesses may be “forced” into some kind of clean solution.

Government support

Hydrogen could become cheaper thanks to public-sector support. The US government has included hydrogen in the more than $500-billion investment package known as the Infrastructure, Investment and Jobs Act. “Billions of dollars are being put towards hydrogen hubs, hydrogen transport systems, storage research, generation of hydrogen, and subsidies on hydrogen,” says Monroe.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a “Hydrogen Shot” aimed at reducing the price of green hydrogen from its current level of around $10 to $15 per kg, down to $1 per kg.

“At $1 per kilogram, you start to compete with hydrocarbons in terms of energy per dollar,” says Monroe. He’s optimistic the DOE will achieve its goal. Its previous “Sun Shot” in the 2010s aimed to get solar electricity down from $6 per Watt

to a target of $1 per Watt by 2020 - and met the goal by 2016.

“I see the exact same kind of things going on in the hydrogen industry, in terms of the projects that are being announced, the companies that are involved, the governments that are subsidizing and funding and encouraging projects.”

The US currently has a $3 per kilogram subsidy for green hydrogen, he says: “So you just need to get the cost down to four bucks a kilogram and you'll see that hydrogen economy start to develop.”

Transporting hydrogen

But if the industry is going to use hydrogen, it must be available where it makes sense. Electricity is provided by a grid, while water and gas are piped where they are needed.

Hydrogen will be produced where there is a surplus of green electricity that can be used to run electrolysis plants. For instance, in Denmark, H2 Energy has ordered 1GW of electrolyzers from Plug Power to produce hydrogen from electricity generated in a giant offshore wind farm.

Getting that to industries wanting to use hydrogen will require a new infrastructure. Monroe says this will have to start from basics: “In the beginning, hydrogen will mostly be transported by truck.”

That’s not a surprise, he says, because hydrogen’s physical profile, and its early applications, is so similar to those of oil.

“Where I live near Denver, we have a lot of scattered oil drilling developments, and I have this picture of the hydrogen transport system developing the way the oil transport system has developed over the last 30 or 40 years,” he says.

“They start with a promising well site, they make it a producing site, and then they begin to pull product out by trucks,” he explains. “When there gets to be enough traffic, and the profits are high enough, they may have a rail spur line that goes to a central area, and then they transport by rail as much as they can, because that's cheaper.”

Finally, he says, “over decades, they decide this is an area where we need a pipeline to a broader area. That can make the transport of the oil much, much cheaper. I think we'll see a progression like that in the hydrogen industry. But for now, almost all the transport plans I’ve seen for hydrogen hubs are truck based.”

Eventually the hydrogen industry will have to get its product shipped where it

is needed, just like other industries: “If you remember when Tesla first started manufacturing in the US, they knew that one of the biggest problems was there weren't enough charging stations. So, along with rolling out the vehicles, they paid for charging stations. They knew that they needed to get the distribution network widespread enough that you could travel from California to New York in the US using an electric car.”

He says: “I think you'll see the same thing in hydrogen. These hubs will be center points for the creation of green hydrogen and transport of green hydrogen. And then, as more demand builds around those hubs, the plans will expand out.

And eventually, it will go into pipelines.

The reliability of pipes

If hydrogen is available on a network of pipes, then it could become a very serious contender for reliable backup, or even primary power for data centers. Some data centers are already looking at natural gas that way despite its carbon intensity. Hydrogen from a pipe could potentially be a reliable green power source,

“The natural gas network is 10 times more available than the electrical grid,” says Monroe. This may be counterintuitive, but it’s based on the fact that gas is physically pumped into the system under pressure, and the pipe system effectively acts as an energy storage system in itself.

“In the event of a failure on the natural gas grid, you have pressure in the system still, and systems will continue running for some time, until the pressure gets too low,” he explains.

But there’s a problem: when hydrogen starts to get into pipelines, things can get political.

Pipeline politics

There is already a widespread network of pipes distributing natural gas. Sadly, these can’t be switched over completely to hydrogen because, as we noted earlier, hydrogen has different properties.

Hydrogen’s tiny molecules can permeate the metal of pipes and containers. This can potentially create leaks, but there’s a more serious concern. Hydrogen atoms can penetrate the metal structure and affect the steel pipes’ fatigue- and fracture-resistance properties, making them more susceptible to cracking.

Hydrogen also has a lower energy per

unit volume than natural gas (note to alert readers: as we said earlier, hydrogen has more energy density by weight than natural gas, but it is much lighter).

This means that if it is put into a pipe system currently used for natural gas, the users on that system will get less energy from the gas they get - unless the pressure is increased to give a faster flow, which creates other problems for the pipeline operator.

Tests such as the US Hyblend initiative suggest that it is possible to blend hydrogen with natural gas in existing pipelines, in concentrations up to 20 percent.

The EU’s policy seems to be suggesting the percentage should be kept between five and 10 percent, with an increase to 15 to 20 percent “towards the end of the decade.”

In the UK, the Energy Networks Association (ENA) has said it can put 20 percent hydrogen into the gas grid from 2023.

Those in favor, including the UK’s government-appointed “hydrogen champion” Jane Toogood, say this will help build critical mass for hydrogen use and cut the carbon intensity of the nation’s gas.

“Blending must be available by 2025 to unlock investment in hydrogen production,” said Toogood, who is chief executive of catalyst technologies at chemical company Johnson Matthey. “Blending potentially aids investment, reduces emissions, enables supply and demand to be balanced, and facilitates early experience with hydrogen, including in the gas National Transmission System (NTS), subject to satisfactory demonstration of the safety case.”

But the idea has faced significant opposition. A group including utility Octopus Energy, thinktank E3G, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth said in a letter to the government, that the scheme would “greenwash” the fossil gas industry, and raise bills for consumers for a negligible level of decarbonization.

'Raising energy bills during a cost of living crisis is the wrong way to develop industrial demand for H2,” said the group. The hydrogen available at the start will be a mix, including green hydrogen, but also a lot of “grey” hydrogen produced from natural gas and oil, so it won’t decarbonize as much as is hoped.

Similar arguments have taken place in the European Parliament, but hydrogen advocates say we have to take up an option that improves what we have, rather than holding out for perfection.

Don’t wait for perfection

“I have a problem with people that throw out a good solution because it's not perfect, right?” says Monroe. “I wouldn't disparage a 10 or 20 percent saving of carbon based on blended hydrogen, if it was available.”

Part of this argument is about the uses of hydrogen. If it goes into consumer networks, it will be used for home and office heating, applications that are better served by electric heat pumps.

By contrast, heavy industries such as steelmaking have a huge need for heat that can’t be delivered electrically, and their carbon intensity will be lowered by hydrogen at any percentage:

“Consumption in the heat generation industries is so large that even if we only knock off five or 10 percent of emissions through blended hydrogen, that's a huge amount of carbon that won't be generated,” says Monroe.

“A steel mill could knock 10 or 20 percent off their carbon footprint by having a blended natural gas hydrogen solution for creating the heat that they need for their processes,” says Monroe.

The use of hydrogen in the natural gas pipeline can become more sophisticated, however, because filters exist that can remove pure hydrogen from a blend of gases - because, as we observed earlier, hydrogen molecules are much smaller than the other gases involved.

“There's demand on both sides,” says Monroe. “Some people want pure hydrogen for fuel cells, but there are also people that want pure natural gas, because they need the higher heat content I think you'll have benefit on both sides if you get to separating the hydrogen at scale”

Blended hydrogen also benefits from the storage function of gas networks, "Research at UCI has shown that we cannot achieve high renewable power use without the features of hydrogen,” says Jack Brouwer, University of California Irvine’s professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and director of the UCI-based National Fuel Cell Research Center.

Brouwer is leading a project to inject hydrogen into pipelines and says: “The massive storage and resilient underground transmission and distribution of renewable energy that will be enabled by transformation of the gas system to renewable and clean hydrogen use will be investigated and advanced in this important effort."

Monroe agrees: “If you take 100 miles of natural gas pipeline with five percent

hydrogen blended, that's a lot of hydrogen. And if you use it that way, the natural gas system has storage and transport. That'll advance hydrogen quite fast!”

Digging for hydrogen

Naturally occurring hydrogen, known as “white hydrogen” could boost the availability. “The optimistic view is that it's there, in quantities that may be large. No one has ever really looked for it before, because we're always looking for oil,” says Monroe.

The oil and gas industry tends to ridicule the idea, saying that if people are digging hydrogen from the ground, that’s “just like we get oil, so why don't we just focus on oil from the ground?”

In Monroe’s view, this is progress - “if they've raised the hackles of the oil and gas industry enough that they're paying attention even to just ridicule it, maybe there is something real to the hydrogen mining industry."

If it’s there, it might be cheap to extract using existing techniques for natural gas: “It seems like a technology transfer would happen pretty quickly.

“It may be even cheaper than generating hydrogen by electrolysis, because I don't think you'll have the amount of capital equipment that you have with a wind farm or a large solar factory. “But like every other piece of the hydrogen industry, it will take some time to get to scale - and then we'll have the same transport problems.”

Geopolitical hydrogen

Once the world can create and distribute hydrogen easily, it could shift the balance of power as new nations become energy rich.

“With the availability of wind and solar, and the ability to produce hydrogen as an energy storage medium, there could be a significant shift in who the real energy producers in the world are over the next 50 years or so,” says Monroe.

INTO THE DATA CENTER

Microsoftis serious about using hydrogen to rid itself of the need for polluting backup systems, having promised to end its dependency on diesels by 2030. But there are multiple ways to get there

There are places where the grid is so reliable that backup is less necessary, and data centers can be built without generators. In others, outages might always be less than three or four hours: “In those cases, you might be able to build a battery energy storage system that would ride through a two or three or four-hour outage until grid power became available again,” says Monroe.

In California, the Energy Commission has warned data center operators to be prepared for 96-hour outages, he says: “And there's no battery in the world, no battery chemistry, no energy storage solution, other than hydrocarbons and maybe hydrogen, that could ride through a 96-hour outage.”

Where the grid is only semi-reliable, “your only solutions are some sort of fuel-based generator system.” Moving from fossil fuels, there are various lowcarbon fuels, including renewable diesel replacement fuels such as hydrotreated vegetable oils, but Monroe warns that burning fuel will generally create nitrous oxides or particulates, making air quality permits hard to get.

So Microsoft has been looking very seriously at hydrogen, either burnt in turbines or reacted in fuel cells. “In terms of direct impact to the data center industry, we're in a bit of a holding pattern,” Monroe says. “We are waiting for products to be available.”

In 2022 Plug Power built a 3MW power generation system for Microsoft, using hydrogen fuel cells, designed as a replacement for a diesel-based UPS system. Microsoft tested it at Plug Power’s site in Latham New York, and verified it could provide backup for a data center.

In a separate project, announced in 2021, Microsoft - along with Caterpillar and Ballard - are working to test a 1MW hydrogen fuel cell backup system at an actual Microsoft data center in Quincy, Washington. That project is partially funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) under the H2@Scale initiative and backed by the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL). It’s not due to be completed until late 2024

“When I was at Microsoft, we qualified that 3MW prototype with Plug Power, and now we're just waiting for them to finish productizing the devices that they will eventually offer to the marketplace,” says Monroe.

But the systems that eventually get

Australia’s Woodside Energy has formed a plan with Singapore’s Keppel to ship liquefied hydrogen from its H2Perth plant to power Keppel’s data centers, because Singapore has very little green power of its own.

Other countries could do similar things: “Maybe this would be an opportunity for Sub-Saharan Africa to become dominant in an energy space. The equatorial countries will have an advantage because they have more sunshine hit them than any other spot on Earth, more reliably and more consistently throughout the year.”

There have been experiments with floating PV panels: “Even the island nations could get into hydrogen production.

“It's going to be very interesting over the next 50 years. If hydrogen becomes a dominant fuel, then who are the energy providers around the world? It could be a significant shift from where it is today.” 

used in data centers may look very different, says Monroe. The Plug Power project was just the simplest way to build hydrogen into the data center infrastructure, he says: “We made no other changes to the electrical system, and made it look as much like a diesel generator as we could, in terms of start time, accepting load, capacities, and connectivity.”

This meant that the DC power generated by the fuel cells was fed through inverters to deliver the AC that a data center would expect.

“There are other ways you could use hydrogen fuel cells, he suggests. “Since it's basically a DC power generator, maybe there’s no need to go through an AC inverter. There are direct current needs within the data center.”

That’s a possibility Microsoft looked at elsewhere. In 2020, the company worked with Power Innovations to power a row of data center servers directly from hydrogen fuel cells for 48 hours straight

Further back, in 2017, the company teamed up with McKinstry and Cummins for a prototype it described as “the world’s first gas data center.”

It powered 20 racks in its Advanced Energy Lab in Seattle with DC power from fuel cells mounted above. 

What you need to know about grid-interactive data centers

A primer on connecting UPS systems to the grid

Uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) have always been relied on to keep the lights on and provide critical services in the event of a grid outage.

From hospitals to intelligent transport systems all the way to data centers, UPSs are there to keep operations running when a grid failure occurs. When everything else is interrupted, they are there to keep things going.

Most, if not all, data center facilities will make use of a huge set of batteries that are part of the UPS systems, with their total capacity sized to the IT load. Those batteries are likely either lead-acid or more modern lithium-ion ones.

Vlad-Gabriel Anghel Head of Product at DCD>Academy

If the data center is built to high availability standards, which make up the majority of modern data centers today, the power stored in their batteries is now at a scale that could now be used to help the grid when it struggles, rather than just weather the problem.

This change also promises easier management of sustainability efforts for owners and operators of data center facilities.

When you don’t trust the grid

The opportunity for embracing more advanced UPS systems comes as most governments and utilities replace carbonintensive energy sources with renewable ones which - while necessary - is impacting the grid.

Whenever a large power plant is brought online, it will cause imbalances in phases and frequency across that electrical grid. This applies equally if a large energy source is decommissioned, and once the intermittency of renewable energy sources is factored in, the grid will experience more and more frequency variations.

If left unchecked, this can lead to outages. User demand can vary massively during different times of the day or year, especially in major weather events, leading to potential grid shortages if not managed well.

The data center business shares the world’s insatiable desire for more energy, and was among the first to support the push for more renewable sources that cut carbon emissions.

As the sector faces a future of unreliable grids, the UPS may prove its worth once again in avoiding calamity.

Criticality and Redundancy of UPS

As we know, the UPS sits at the heart of the electrical distribution system of a data center, providing clean, uninterruptible power to the IT equipment and, along with a power switching mechanism, keeping the IT load alive during the period of switching to an on-site power source, usually in the form of a diesel generator.

For a data center facility, the higher the availability requirement, the higher the battery and generator capacity installed to ensure that the facility keeps the IT load going no matter what.

This often unused capacity, with the right tools, can be made available to the grid in order to help it recover from an outage or outright prevent one. This is currently being explored by the bigger players in the industry through what is known as a grid-interactive UPS.

Talking to the grid

UPS systems within high-availability data centers will leverage double or sometimes triple the required battery capacity to ensure mission-critical IT loads are never lost. However, this capacity is almost never used up, creating an opportunity.

Through the use of an external controller and a swathe of digital capabilities, data from the grid flows in real-time. When a change in grid frequency occurs, it instructs the UPS to respond with positive and negative regulation by charging or draining the batteries within their operational

limitations. This effectively turns the data center’s UPS into a DER - distributed energy resource.

This, in turn, can create a new generation of grid-interactive data centers and potentially shift them from being huge consumers of energy into a critical part of the wider electrical distribution system.

Selling flexibility into the grid allows data centers to monetize underutilized resources by providing energy storage and supplying the fast-frequency response services that grid operators will increasingly require as renewable energy capacity increases and the grid loses the rigidity associated with fossil-fuel power generation.

The benefits

A grid-interactive UPS can help data centers commercialize their stored energy and reduce their overall energy cost, having a positive impact on a facility's Total Cost of Operation (TCO) - which is primarily led by the cost of energy.

This is accomplished through balancing services, which assist demand in meeting grid supply by focusing on quick frequency response and demand control. Balancing services ensure that power supply meets real demand, providing grid stability and enabling income production as well as energy savings.

Further, if the facility takes part in demand management programs with the local grid - also known as “peak shaving” - it can lower its energy consumption by switching to its onsite power generation or relying on the stored capacity in its batteries. Through this mechanism, it helps the grid avoid an outage.

Essentially, grid-balancing data centers earn additional "energy" compensation based on how quickly they respond to frequency fluctuations as well as the quantity of energy saved.

The remaining challenges

With the technology being fairly new, there are few examples of real-world deployments at scale. Change-adverse data center operators remain reluctant to change the UPS systems they have relied on so far, which are at the heart of mission-critical operations.

Most concerns revolve around the impact of the lifecycle of the batteries themselves as grid-interactive

technologies will charge and discharge the batteries more than is the case now in data center facilities.

Manufacturers stress that these concerns are unfounded as operational limits can be baked into the grid response methodology, allowing the UPS to interact with the grid only when it is safe to do so. Further, modern UPS systems have builtin optimization features and advanced analytics to deal with the main aging factors related to each battery chemistry.

Current deployments

With the technology being relatively new and only fit for some players within this industry, details about existing gridinteractive UPS deployments are scarce.

In July last year, Microsoft, together with Eaton’s EnergyAware UPS, leveraged this technology in their Dublin data center campus. This move stems from the fact that EirGrid, Ireland’s electrical distribution operator now prioritizes noncarbon energy sources and Microsoft is participating through Enel X - an energy services and solutions provider that aggregates industrial and commercial energy consumers into virtual power plants.

While exact numbers are not disclosed, such as battery capacity and how much of that Microsoft is willing to have available for grid interactivity, what we do know is that, over the next couple of years, this move will remove about two million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise be generated from Ireland’s National Grid.

Telia is also connecting the UPS systems at its 24MW Helsinki data center in Finland to the local grid.

Despite the unknowns, the technology definitely piques the interest of owners and operators of data center facilities, with analyst firm Omdia noting that more than 80 percent of survey respondents will most likely deploy grid-interactive UPSs within the next five years. As usual for this industry, the technology will require more deployments and for it to mature before it becomes the standard way data centers and other mission-critical facilities will be built.

But the energy landscape shows no signs of improving any time soon as more renewable sources come online and demand outstrips supply. As pressure grows, it may become harder to ignore the swathe of benefits that come with gridinteractive UPS technology.