Hydrogen-powered data center planned for Texas – pv magazine USA

September 25, 2024 Michael Puttre

The International Energy Agency has 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 by the Electric Power Research Institute says artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining are the main drivers of that demand. Getting electricity to data centers without increasing fossil fuel consumption will be a major factor in future utility planning.

A key aspect of meeting this challenge is integrating electricity generation sources into the data center design to ensure the use of low-carbon sources. California-based data center developer ECL is incorporating hydrogen fuel cells and battery storage into its designs to enable completely self-contained generating capacity, even to the point of being grid-independent.

ECL has announced it is building a hydrogen-powered data center, TerraSite-TX1, near Houston, Texas. The company says the first phase of the project will require 50 MW of power and is expected to be operational in the summer of 2025 at a cost of $450 million. Current plans call for the facility to have a capacity of 1 GW of on-site, off-grid energy, supplied by hydrogen fuel cells and battery storage, at a cost of $8 billion. ECL says funding for TerraSite-TX1 is coming from itself and its financial partners.

ELC operates the facilities it builds with a “data center as a service” business model, in which it provides infrastructure for its customers’ computers and servers. In addition to announcing the new TerraSite-TX1, the company said it has signed a contract with AI cloud operator Lambda to host its research and application development customers.

Yuval Bachar, CEO of ECL, said pv usa magazine that he and his partners founded the company in 2021 specifically to address the energy demands of growing data center needs. According to Bachar, there are about 105 GW of data centers built in the last 50 years, about a third of them in the U.S.

“With the advent of AI, we’re being asked to build an additional 45-50 GW in the next three to five years, which is exponential growth in any field and is a relatively challenging project in itself,” he said.

ECL’s data center design is based on hydrogen fuel stacks that can be deployed in 1- to 2-MW modules to support growing data processing and infrastructure, including cooling and battery storage. The company opened its first facility, called MVI, using this architecture in Mountain View, California, in June.

Electricity is generated by mixing hydrogen and oxygen, which also produces fresh water as a byproduct for cooling and other uses. The hydrogen is shipped by truck in pressurized containers or extracted on-site from pipelines. The approximately 600-acre site for TerraSite-TX1 was chosen because it is at the confluence of three pipelines used by the natural gas industry.

One challenge with hydrogen as a fuel is its production. So-called “green” hydrogen is produced from water by electrolysis using electricity from renewable sources. This isn’t always possible or economical. A more common method is to release hydrogen from natural gas using steam. However, according to an article published in MIT’s Climate Portal, this process releases 830 million metric tons of CO2 per year to produce about 74 million metric tons of hydrogen. Furthermore, the infrastructure to deliver hydrogen from sources to points of use is insufficient for industrial-scale power generation.

Bachar said his company plans to use solar power to overcome the constraints on data center locations imposed by the limitations of hydrogen transportation infrastructure. In what he calls an “behind the meter, behind the fence” arrangement, ECL’s hydrogen-powered data center would be located next to a large solar plant, which in many cases overproduces at certain times of day and is curtailed or sold at low prices.

“We plan to put data centers next to these sites and connect them directly to the power from the fields, solar or wind,” he said. “So we come to these sites and say, okay, we’ll put a data center right next to you and take all the power 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 collected in this way is used to produce hydrogen through electrolysis, which is stored in gaseous form and also used to charge the battery. The data center remains powered by hydrogen, and the renewable energy facility provides inexpensive electricity to maintain the fuel supply.

The demand for energy from growing 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 power and on-site battery storage for energy-hungry data centers.