Hydrogen Infrastructure: Data-Center Supply-Refueling Station Synergy

Abstract

Nowadays, data-center are available in a lot of cities in different countries around the world. Their continuous growth in size and complexity due to the increasing demand for storage, networking and computation has become a world wide energetic problem. Taking into account their huge consumption of electricity and the amount of carbon emission in the air, researchers work on making data-centers as green as possible using renewable energy sources. On the other hand, electrical cars, more and more common as they have the potential to provide a high autonomy and to reduce significantly the emmissions that contribute to climate change. These green cars have however an inconvenient which is the availability of hydrogen station to fill their tank. Thus, this paper presents first a sizing of a hybrid system to power a data-center of 500 kW composed of photovoltaic panels, winding turbines, batteries and fuel cells. Consequently, this paper presents an option for this hydrogen storage to become easily a secure hydrogen station to supply fuel cell cars. Our contribution consists then in finding the accurate sizing (wind turbines, solar panels as primary sources, hydrogen as a long term storage and batteries as a back up) for both data centers and fuel cell vehicles.

Combined IT and power supply infrastructure sizing for standalone green data centers

“…The capacity of the tanks is high (we consider tons of hydrogen), so this decision can be easily scheduled without risking to jeopardize the safety of the data center supply. This decision has not to be seen as a failure in the data center management: the hydrogen market exists and new hydrogen usage is expanding, especially in the vehicle domain, electrical bus or cars using fuel cells and batteries [18]. Moreover, buying certified green hydrogen (i.e., hydrogen certified to be produced from renewable energy and not from fossil fuels) is convenient and keeps the computation within the data center totally green.…”

A survey of challenges and solutions for the integration of renewable energy in datacenters

“…To enable better RES integration, energy storage systems are required to enable shifting generation and/or consumption over time. They enable storing excess generation for later use, e.g., storing excess PV generation during the day for use at night [72,73,74,75,76]. Other applications include the ability to provide ancillary services to the grid [77] [78] (e.g., by increasing or decreasing the datacenter load depending on an external signal provided by the transmission system operator), demand response (e.g., by discharging a battery to reduce the net load on the utility grid in case of congestion or limited generation capacity), or arbitrage (e.g., using local storage to be able to use stored energy or the grid depending on prices) [79,80,81,82].…”

Negotiation game for joint IT and energy management in green datacenters

“…As a result, the sizing of the experimented datacenter is 1 MW. This sizing is based on our other research [43], which focuses on the sub-topic Infrastructure sizing inside the DATAZERO project. We also note that the negotiation algorithm works based on the relative relationship between the power of ITDM and PDM, instead of absolute values of power.…”