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Fuel Cells – Cracking the Code to the Data Center

March 29, 2016

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Are Fuel Cells the Future of Energy?

For almost two centuries science and technology have been refining the fuel cell. A fuel cell, while electrochemical in nature, converts electrons of hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, with by products dissipating heat and water. As an auspicious technology, fuel cells offer a clean, efficient renewable energy source, with hydrogen, the most abundant chemical element in the Universe.

In the early 1960’s to early 70’s NASA the National Aeronautics and Space Administration utilized regenerative fuel cells during the Apollo moon landing missions. In 2003 President Bush announced a Hydrogen Fuel initiative. In the last decade, the automobile industry has been progressing towards a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle for commercial use. Today we are employing this fundamental element as fuel cells not only for propulsion but for heat and electricity.

The data center industry requires high quality, uninterruptible power, such as with cloud data center infrastructure. Fuel cells can provide power without disruptions or voltage distortions. Ebay has also made strides in Salt Lake City, Utah with its data center powered by renewable energy. In 2012 Apple announced construction for two 100 acre solar arrays, which would produce 42 million kWh of energy. Recently Microsoft became the latest in tech companies finally showing serious interest in hydrogen fuel cells. Yet Apple still has a profound lead using fuel cells to power data centers.

For future cloud data centers, fuel cells are a favorable source of energy while offering an efficient solution with low emissions.

As more digital services become available, workload with severe peak overloads cannot compete with traditional electrical power plants.The problem with fuel cells, which use a chemical process converting gas to electricity, just cannot keep up with demands. Recently Microsoft received a Federal grant to study methane fuel cells for in-rack usage.

In a blog posted by Sean James, a Senior Research Program Manager summarizes the successful proof of concept with fuel cells providing power to rack servers.

“Since servers a) run internally on DC voltage anyway, and b) already have sophisticated voltage regulating circuits internally, we saw an opportunity. Using an off-the-shelf fuel cell system, we cutout the power regulation circuits and bypassed the AC-DC rectifier circuits in the server and powered each server directly off the fuel cell stack. Then we subjected the system to transients; powering up and down servers, etc. Nothing broke. Not only that, the electrical efficiency, from fuel cell stack to server, improved by a full third from 39.8% to 53.3%! This is improving an already very efficient system by eliminating parasitic loads and eliminating many points of failure and cost.”

Microsoft’s design of fuel cells integrating into data center racks will reduce energy loss over the power distribution centers. If continued this will be a promising accomplishment for fuel cell economics to cut other costs and respective liabilities.