Is this
the fuel cell that will crack the code to the data center?
The controversial idea of using fuel cells to
power data centers has been under discussion for the past couple of years.
Probably the most famous project out there is Apple’s 10 MW fuel cell farm, which uses 50 fuel cells from Silicon Valley startup
Bloom Energy installed next to its east coast data center in North
Carolina.
But Microsoft is just starting to kick off a
pretty unusual and innovative project using fuel cells and data centers that
could some day draw a lot of interest. Microsoft is working with young startup
Redox Power Systems and using a grant from the Department of Energy’s
ARPA-E program, to test out Redox’s fuel cells to power individual server racks
within a data center.
A Redox Power Systems fuel cell is shown off at
the ARPA-E 2015 Summit.
For a refresher, fuel cells are devices that
take a fuel (usually natural gas or biogas) and oxygen and run these substances
through a chemical reaction (using a catalyst and stacks of materials) to create
electricity. It’s set up like a battery (with an anode, a cathode and an
electrolyte) but it generates energy, instead of storing energy like a battery
does.
Microsoft’s idea for its new fuel cell project
is unusual because most of the limited number of fuel cells that are being used
for data centers today — like the ones at Apple’s facility — have been installed
in clusters outside of the data center, or in a separate area of the data
center, away from the servers. This set up requires conversion infrastructure to
convert the DC power from the fuel cell farm into AC power to be pumped into or
around the data center, and then converted back into DC power to be used by the
servers.
Microsoft’s plan is to essentially distribute
lots of small fuel cell stacks down at the individual server level, delivering
onsite energy, cutting out the conversion infrastructure and eliminating those
costs. Without the infrastructure costs, Microsoft could in theory afford to
potentially pay higher prices for fuel cells, which despite the best efforts of
a handful of companies have long been pretty expensive compared to grid
power.
Bloom Energy fuel cells at Apple’s data center. Image
courtesy of Gigaom.
Microsoft has actually been working on this
idea, and considering fuel cells in general, for several years. The company
wrote a white paper
on the fuel-cell-per-rack model over a year and a half ago and already trialled
the technology at a test facility at UC Irvine using a proton exchange membrane
fuel cell (or PEM). Microsoft is also trialling fuel cells, powered by biogas,
at a test data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, which turned on late last year.
But even with the company’s fuel-cell-per-rack
idea, fuel cells, in general, still seemed too expensive for Microsoft to deploy
at a large scale, beyond a small pilot, explained Microsoft’s Director of Energy
Strategy Brian Janous. It’s been “frustrating” trying to figure out how to scale
fuel cells into something “material for us,” in the tens of megawatts scale,
Janous told me.
It wasn’t until Microsoft connected with the
Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, and its low-cost fuel cell project — called REBELS for Reliable Electricity Based on
Electrochemical Systems — that the Internet company saw there might be some
early stage technology that could deliver a more dramatic cost reduction than
was currently available on the market.
A fuel cell from Redox Power Systems shown off at the
ARPA-E Summit 2015.
That’s where Redox
Power Systems comes in. When Janous
heard the prices that Redox was quoting — which he called “remarkably lower than
anything out there today,” and “not even in same ballpark” — he told the company
“we’re in. We want to provide a platform to commercialize it.”
Redox’s core innovation is using nanotechnology
to create a composition of ceramics materials for a solid oxide fuel cell,
developed over the years by scientist and founder Eric Wachsman, who’s the
director of the Energy Research Center at the University of
Maryland (you can read more of the
tech details and patents here).
While it’s still early days for Redox Power
Systems, the company says it can deliver an ultra low cost, low temperature (650
to 400 C), compact fuel cell that Microsoft can use cost-effectively for its
fuel-cell-per-rack idea. Wachsman has said the fuel cells can produce electricity for $1 per watt,
which would make it competitive with grid power, and has also described it as being able to provide “100 times the density per
cost of current cells, one tenth the cost and at one tenth the size.”
Janous said Microsoft will be getting the first
fuel cell stacks from Redox in the Fall of 2015, and will start “kicking the
tires” on it then. If the tech operates as advertised, and the startup meets its
milestones, the three-year, $5 million project will scale up the system and
evaluate how it operates with the servers.
At the ARPA-E Summit last week I got a chance
to see one of the 25 kw Redox fuel cell units on the showcase floor. The
metallic compact box, filled with the fuel cell’s stacks that do the chemical
electricity creation, has been designed with a glowing green string of neon
lights and cubes. It looks like something you’d see in Tron.
Microsoft is also working with other fuel cell
makers that are a little farther along on the path to commercialization on this
idea, but declined to name the companies. Earlier this month Microsoft showed off a proof of concept that a server
can be run off of DC power of a fuel cell.
In this way, Microsoft is playing an important
role, helping act as a commercialization partner for early stage startups. And
if those innovations pan out, Microsoft will be the first company to benefit
from them, potentially giving it a competitive edge.
How important will fuel cells be to Microsoft
and its overall data center initiatives in the end? Janous said: “It’s really
hard to say. We’re bullish enough that we’re putting a lot of time and resources
in piloting this tech. It could be game changing if it works. But it’s still
very early.”
