Hydrogen Powered Data Centers ~ Perspectives with Neilo

Perspectives with Neilo · Hydrogen Powered Data Centers

In today's digital age, data centers have become the backbone of our interconnected world. From streaming our favorite shows to conducting complex financial transactions, these high-powered facilities are the engines driving our digital revolution. But as our reliance on technology grows, so does the energy consumption of these data centers.

This increasing energy consumption is driving data center operators and tech entrepreneurs to explore new ways to power these energy-hungry facilities more efficiently and sustainably.

As we heard in our previous episode from the Open Compute Global Summit in San Jose, data centers consume large amounts of electricity and this increasing trend is being driven by new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

According to a recent report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), there are currently more than 8,000 data centers globally and in 2022, they are estimated to have consumed around 460 TWh of electricity - about 2% of global demand, and they predict that this demand could double before the end of the decade.

While its still early days for AI and ML, the emerging capabilities and potential benefits have created an urgency for tech companies to continue to innovate in this important global race.

From a sustainability perspective, many data center owners and operators have also committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2030, so the increasing electricity demands of AI and ML place an additional urgency on achieving a successful transition to sustainable power sources.

In 2023, renewable energy sources accounted for an average of 30% of the world's electricity supply, and as many national power grids also face demand constraints, data center operators are looking to off-grid sources for alternatives.

One option for data centers is to generate and store power onsite with solar or wind turbines plus battery storage, however, given the space requirements of solar and wind this may not always be feasible and many operators resort to purchasing renewal energy offsets (Renewable Energy Certificates or Power Purchase Agreements).

More recently we've seen announcements particularly from hyperscalers of power purchase agreements for nuclear power, but also their intent to investigate Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and nuclear fuel strategy roadmaps. However, many commentators agree that the construction timeline for SMRs is likely to stretch to the end of the decade before they break ground.

A third less controversial option is the hydrogen powered data center. While some data center providers have deployed hydrogen fuel cells as backup power supplies and others are conducting trials, Edge Cloud Link (ECL) based in Mountain View, California has combined fuel cells using green hydrogen derived from renewable energy with battery energy storage and a highly reliable power architecture to deliver an off-grid sustainably powered data center.

ECL say their mission is to deliver a fully sustainable green data center to market via disruptive engineering, design and deployment of emerging technologies that have never been combined. They claim that the resulting efficiency culminates in a lower-cost alternative with zero carbon emissions.

We went along to chat with the founder and CEO of ECL, Yuval Bachar about ECL's vision and the technology and performance of their hydrogen powered data center.