World’s largest roll out of fuel cells for data centres
Twelve data centres in the US will be powered by fuel cells from Bloom Energy over the next 15 years, producing a total capacity of more than 37MW by 2019. The fuel cells use a proprietary solid oxide technology to generate electricity with water and a small amount of carbon dioxide as by-products. This follows a trial of the technology at Equinix’s Silicon Valley SV5 IBX data centre that began in 2015.
A data centre in Frankfurt also uses fuel cells, and 81% of the Equinix data centres in Europe use renewable energy. For example, the data centre in Amsterdam uses solar panels and geothermal energy. The remaining centres were acquired from Telecity and are moving to renewable sources as the conrtacts come up for renewal says the company.
The new project will install fuel cells at seven Equinix IBX data centers in the Silicon Valley (SV1, SV2, SV3, SV4, SV5, SV6, SV10), three in the New York area (NY2, NY4, NY5) and two in the Los Angeles area (LA3, LA4). With the existing fuel cell at SV5, and existing fuel cell installations at two IBXs acquired from Verizon this year (LA7 and NY13), the new project will bring Equinix to 40MW of fuel cell power at 15 locations.
Over the lifetime of the project, this will avoid 660,000 tons of carbon emissions and save 87 billion gallons of water that would have been used by natural gas or coal-fired power stations.
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