It wasn’t all sea ice and saunas.
When Convion’s Erkko Fontell and Tuomas Hakala gave us a guided tour of one of their industry-leading 60kW solid oxide electrolysers (SOE) during our recent visit to their laboratory in Finland, we were profoundly impressed.
In some locations, grid power is either unreliable or already fully utilised, so if data centres are to grow their computer capacity in order to meet the world’s exponential growth in data storage needs, then they will surely need to look for alternative and effective green power solutions.
Data centre operators are starting to recognise the potential benefits of switching their power requirements away from the grid and diesel-powered generators in favour of electrolysers. With 20 billion KW of diesel-powered generators installed in just the UPS back-up role, it’s certain that this move can make a significant contribution to their decarbonisation journey.
Convion’s systems integration know-how can be modularised and scaled to 1MW+ in a containerised SOE solution. Their optional reversibility – run them as fuel cells or electrolysers – provides remarkable flexibility.
Some of you may be thinking that this would require PEM or alkaline electrolyser technologies, rather than the more efficient SOE, due to the need for an instantaneous UPS response if grid power goes down at a data centre location. But solid oxide solutions can work as the primary energy source of a data centre in place of the grid.
As a valued Novazure client, Convion adds huge value and wealth of knowledge to our ecosystem of customers, providing break-through technology that can power data centres and other major energy users to proactively tackle decarbonisation.
If you would like to know more about how your data centres might benefit from the advancement in these and other technologies then please reach out to Phil Cholerton, Partner, or Jean-Jacques Jouanna, Managing Director at NovAzure.
If you missed our first Convion article in a small series we are currently doing please click here to go and read that article.
