Equinix, Inc. stated that the Clean Hydrogen Partnership will contribute EUR 2.5 million toward the development of low-carbon fuel cells for data center power.
It is hoped that this would result in a 100 percent reduction in carbon emissions from operations.
EcoEdge PrimePower (E2P2) is a revolutionary proof-of-concept venture aimed at developing and demonstrating low-emission fuel cells capable of providing cost-effective and robust prime power solutions for the data center environment.
Equinix, InfraPrime, RISE, Snam, SOLIDpower, TEC4FUELS, and Vertiv will collaborate to investigate an innovative integration of solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFC) with uninterruptible power supply (UPS) technology and lithium-ion batteries to provide resilient and clean primary power to data center deployments and other critical infrastructure. Implementing natural gas SOFC as a primary power source will pave the way for the use of green hydrogen in fuel cell applications, both backup and primary.
Equinix’s long-term aim, as the world’s digital infrastructure firm with a future-focused sustainability strategy, is to achieve global climate neutrality by 2030 and 100 percent renewable energy across its global footprint. The E2P2 initiative is part of the company’s commitment to prioritize and encourage the development of clean, sustainable, and renewable energy solutions for use in data centers, while simultaneously meeting the company’s own ambitious climate targets.
“The Office of the CTO at Equinix is chartered with driving the next-generation of technologies and architectures to advance the vision of Platform Equinix,” adds Justin Dustzadeh, Chief Technology Officer at Equinix. “A key component of our vision is to deliver our solutions whilst meeting our important sustainability commitments. The E2P2 project enables us to demonstrate a novel architecture for power generation, distribution and storage; support a broader transition from natural gas to sustainable hydrogen; and support our goal of operating a climate neutral business by 2030.”
Fuel cells are widely acknowledged as a more environmentally friendly and quieter kind of energy that might help urban power grids cope with increased demand. They can be installed on-site at a data center campus and run on natural gas, biogas, liquefied petroleum gas, or green hydrogen—all of which can be transported and distributed using existing gas networks.
The E2P2 project is an exciting step toward significant carbon reduction while still meeting the important power supply requirements for data centers. At the heart of this vision is a market-driven approach that merges innovation and stakeholder involvement in order to maximize the acceptability and uptake of stationary fuel cells as dependable, efficient, and decentralized primary energy sources for other industrial scale applications.
The consortium’s goal is to establish an authoritative open standard for fuel cell applications, paving the way for the commercialization of fuel cell electricity for data centers in Europe and demonstrating the industry’s potential contribution to meeting the EU’s carbon reduction targets.
Bart Biebuyck, Executive Director, Clean Hydrogen Partnership: “With its ongoing support of research and development of fuel cells for stationary applications, the Clean Hydrogen Partnership (previously FCH JU) managed to set a strong basis for European industry to lead in the deployment of new technologies. We are proud to see that the E2P2 project will provide clean fuel cell-based applications for the decarbonization of data centers within a solid consortium gathering fuel cell providers, system integrators as well as data center operators and energy utilities. Projects such as E2P2 are absolutely essential in offering solutions to un-tap markets with great potential and contribute to our ambitious EU climate targets.”
Eugene Bergen Henegouwen, President, EMEA, Equinix:”The E2P2 project hopes to be a breakthrough in making data centers more environmentally sustainable worldwide. Equinix has committed to mitigating our environmental impact, and this project provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate the use of an innovative, clean, primary energy source. We hope it will make a considerable impact towards reaching our global commitment of 100% renewable energy and climate neutrality by 2030, as well as advancing our industry’s sustainability goals. It’s important we support the growth of the market in Europe for clean and reliable on-site power.”
Susanna Kass and Dr. Alberto Ravagni, Co-Founders, InfraPrime:”The E2P2 clean energy standard is an inflection point for clean cloud providers to achieve Carbon Neutral (Positive) cloud infrastructure on a global scale. InfraPrime is proud to lead in this project on the creation of an open industry standard to support the global adoption of eco edge prime power solutions with fuel cells across clean cloud infrastructure, to support industries and applications at hyperscale.”
Dr Jon Summers, Scientific Lead in Data Centers, RISE:”This decade is undeniably focused on building a future that is environmentally sustainable. We all know that digitization and data centers are key elements of this future, where innovation is at the heart of our journey to our global 2030 goals. As researchers at RISE, we are invested to be a strong part of the E2P2 team, to push the technology envelope and to transparently demonstrate new sustainable approaches of prime power for the future digital infrastructure.”
Cosma Panzacchi, Executive Vice President Hydrogen, Snam:”We are happy to contribute our know-how to the E2P2 alliance to help tackle the issue of powering urban data centers with clean and competitive energy solutions. The concept of connecting fuel cells to gas networks to power resilient urban and edge data centers overcomes the need to have backup generation in such areas, thus reducing emissions as well as noise impact. This project is part of Snam’s efforts to foster the use of hydrogen to decarbonize economic sectors, leveraging existing gas networks and sustainable technologies like hydrogen-ready fuel cells.”
Massimo Bertoldi, CTO, SOLIDpower:”SOLIDpower is proud to contribute to the E2P2 project with its proprietary Solid Oxide Fuel Cell technology and systems. We strongly believe in the use of fuel cell generators for prime power in data centers, offering a unique combination of energy savings and high power reliability. Particularly, the E2P2 project is part of our efforts aimed to support the development of clean, sustainable and renewable power solutions for application across the data center industry, contributing to reach ambitious climate goals and carbon neutrality by 2050 as committed by Europe. We are excited to join the E2P2 consortium and kick-off this project.”
Dr. Klaus Lucka, Managing Director, TEC4FUELS: “TEC4FUELS is a competence center for sustainable liquid and gaseous energy carriers (fuels) and operating fluids in technical systems. For the operation of the fuel cells, the company contributes its know-how to the research project in the supply and purification of the process gas medium and water. In addition, TEC4FUELS is developing a sensor-based fluid condition monitoring system to monitor gas and water quality. The aim is to help reduce system-related greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing the operational reliability and service life of technical components and increasing the efficiency of this subsystem.”
Giordano Albertazzi, President, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Vertiv:”Digitization and the data center industry are growing at an increasing pace and thus it is even more vital to fast-track our journey towards an environmentally sustainable future. This can only be made possible by developing clean, innovative technologies such as fuel-cell solutions to provide sustainable power for the digital world. Vertiv is proud to actively contribute to the E2P2 proof-of-concept initiative and looks forward to providing next-generation power solutions to its global customers”.
