The International Energy Agency reported that data centers are the fastest growing source of electricity demand in the U.S., with consumption expected to double by 2026. A report from the Electric Power Research Institute says artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining are principal drivers of this demand. Supplying electricity for data centers without increasing fossil fuel consumption will be a major factor in utility planning going forward.
A key aspect of meeting this challenge is to integrate electricity generating sources into the data center design to ensure low-carbon sources are used. California-based data center developer ECL is incorporating hydrogen fuel cells and battery storage into its projects to enable a completely self-contained generating capacity, even to the point of being grid free.
ECL announced it is building its hydrogen-powered TerraSite-TX1 data center near Houston, Texas. The company says the first phase of the project will require 50 MW of power and is expected to go online in the summer of 2025 at a cost of $450 million. Current plans are for the facility to have a capacity of 1 GW of on-site, off-grid power supplied by hydrogen fuel cells and battery storage at a cost of $8 billion. ECL says the financing for TerraSite-TX1 is coming from itself and its and financial partners.
ELC operates the facilities it builds with a “data-center-as-a-service” business model, wherein it provides the infrastructure for its clients’ computers and servers. Along with announcing its new TerraSite-TX1 the company said it has signed AI cloud operator Lambda, which serves as a host for research and applications developer clients.
Yuval Bachar, CEO of ECL, told pv magazine USA that he and his partners founded the company in 2021 specifically to tackle the energy demand aspects of expanding data center needs. According to Bachar, there are about 105 GW of data centers in the world that have been built over the last 50 years or so, about a third of them in the U.S.
“With the AI emergence we are being asked to build an additional 45 to 50 GW in the next three to five years, which is an exponential growth in any domain and a relatively challenging project by itself,” he said.
Image: ECL
ECL’s data center design relies on hydrogen fuel stacks that can be implemented in 1 to 2 MW modules to support increasing data processing and infrastructure, including cooling and battery storage. The company opened its first facility, dubbed MVI, using this architecture in Mountain View, Calif., in June.
Electricity is generated by mixing hydrogen and oxygen, which also produces fresh water as a byproduct for cooling and other purposes. Hydrogen is either transported by truck in pressurized containers or extracted onsite from pipelines. The roughly 600-acre location for TerraSite-TX1 was selected because it is at the confluence of three pipelines used by the natural gas industry.
One of the challenges of hydrogen as a fuel is producing it in the first place. So called “green” hydrogen is produced from water by electrolysis using electricity from renewable sources. This is not always possible or economical. A more common method is to liberate hydrogen from natural gas using steam. However, according to an article published on MIT’s Climate Portal this process releases 830 million metric tons of CO2 each year to produce about 74 million metric tons of hydrogen. On top of this, the infrastructure for delivering hydrogen from sources to points of use are inadequate for industrial-scale power generation.
Bachar said his company plans to take advantage of solar power to overcome limitations in data center siting imposed by the limits of the hydrogen transportation infrastructure. In an arrangement he calls “behind the meter, over the fence” an ECL hydrogen-powered data center would be located next to a large photovoltaic plant, which in many cases are overproducing at certain times of day and are in curtailment or selling at low rates.
“We are planning to put data centers next to those sites and connect a direct feed from the fields, solar or wind,” he said. “So, we come to those sites and say, okay we’ll put the data center right next to you and we’ll take all the power that you can give us behind the meter. Don’t even touch the grid. We don’t care about the grid. We’ll take it directly from you.”
The electricity taken this way is used to generate hydrogen through electrolysis that is stored in gaseous form and also used to charge batteries. The data center remains powered by hydrogen with the renewable energy facility providing inexpensive electricity to maintain a supply of fuel.
The demand for energy from proliferating data centers is creating other partnerships with renewable energy developers. Last January, Tennessee-based Silicon Ranch signed an agreement with Colorado-based Tract to collaborate on green campuses to provide solar and battery storage onsite for power-hungry data centers.
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