Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the worlds digital infrastructure company™, today announced the Clean Hydrogen Partnership will provide EUR 2.5 million to help fund a project to develop low-carbon fuel cells to power data centres. It is hoped this could reduce carbon emissions from operations by up to 100%. The EcoEdge PrimePower (E2P2) project is a novel proof-of-concept initiative aiming to develop and demonstrate low environmental impact fuel cells that provide economic and resilient prime power solutions for the data centre environment.
A consortium of seven companies—Equinix, InfraPrime, RISE, Snam, SOLIDpower, TEC4FUELS
and Vertiv—will explore an innovative integration of solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFC) with uninterruptible
power supply (UPS) technology and lithium-ion batteries to provide resilient and clean primary power
to data centre deployments and other critical infrastructure. Implementing natural gas SOFC as a
prime power application will be instrumental to pave the way for the use of green hydrogen for fuel
cells application, for both backup and prime power systems.
As the world’s digital infrastructure company with a future-first sustainability strategy, Equinix has a
long-term goal to become climate neutral globally by 2030 and achieve 100 percent renewable energy
across its global footprint. The E2P2 project is part of the company’s effort to prioritise and support the
development of clean, sustainable and renewable power solutions for application across the data
centre industry, while also targeting its own ambitious climate goals.
“The Office of the CTO at Equinix is chartered with driving the next-generation of technologies and
architectures to advance the vision of Platform Equinix” adds Justin Dustzadeh, Chief Technology
Officer at Equinix. “A key component of our vision is to deliver our solutions whilst meeting our
important sustainability commitments. The E2P2 project enables us to demonstrate a novel
architecture for power generation, distribution and storage; support a broader transition from natural
gas to sustainable hydrogen, and support our goal of operating a climate-neutral business by 2030.”
A greener future for the industry.
Fuel cells are recognised as a cleaner and quieter power solution that can alleviate demand on urban
power grids. They can be deployed on-site at a data centre campus, and operate using natural gas,
biogas, LPG or green hydrogen—which can be transported and distributed over existing gas networks.
The E2P2 project marks an exciting step toward significant carbon reduction, whilst still meeting
requirements for a highly resilient critical power supply to data centres. At the heart of this vision, is a
market-oriented approach that integrates innovation and stakeholder engagement to maximise
acceptance and uptake opportunities of stationary fuel cells as reliable, efficient and decentralised
prime power sources for other industrial-scale applications.
The consortium hopes to develop the authoritative open standard for fuel cell applications to
pave the way toward commercialisation of fuel cell energy for data centres in Europe, demonstrating
the industry’s potential role in achieving EU carbon reduction targets.
Highlights/Key Facts
- E2P2 is a joint project from Equinix, InfraPrime, RISE, Snam, SOLIDpower, TEC4FUELS and
Vertiv, partially funded with a grant by the Clean Hydrogen Partnership, from the Horizon 2020
program of the European Commission. - The consortium will engage with the organisations that work on developing European best
practices and standards to facilitate high-level concept design and interface definitions. - The E2P2 project goals are aligned to the objectives of the European Commission to rapidly
accelerate the application of fuel cells to power the needs of energy-intensive sectors while
achieving a greener grid. E2P2 aims to achieve multiple environmental objectives, including
showcasing a real-world proof of concept of 24/7 low-carbon power that does not rely on diesel
generators and supports the growing hydrogen and renewable energy economy across
Europe. The intention is for the resulting units to replace the traditional power supply and
generators, with additional redundancies built in to maintain uptime standards. - Equinix has significant experience leveraging large-scale fuel cell platforms in North
America—including powering 15 data centres with fuel cells across the Silicon Valley, Los
Angeles and New York metros. Equinix will leverage its experience and team to deploy and
test the experimental E2P2 fuel cell platform at a dedicated space within one of its Milan, Italy,
data centres. The team expects to work to develop a commercially viable product that will
facilitate a greener future for data centres across Europe and the world.
Quotes
Bart Biebuyck, Executive Director, Clean Hydrogen Partnership:
“With its ongoing support of research and development of fuel cells for stationary applications,
the Clean Hydrogen Partnership (previously FCH JU) managed to set a strong basis for
European industry to lead in the deployment of new technologies. We are proud to see that the
E2P2 project will provide clean fuel cell-based applications for the decarbonisation of data
centres within a solid consortium gathering fuel cell providers, system integrators as well as
data centre operators and energy utilities. Projects such as E2P2 are absolutely essential in
offering solutions to un-tap markets with great potential and contribute to our ambitious EU
climate targets.”
Eugene Bergen Henegouwen, President, EMEA, Equinix:
“The E2P2 project hopes to be a breakthrough in making data centres more environmentally
sustainable worldwide. Equinix has committed to mitigating our environmental impact, and this
project provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate the use of an innovative, clean, primary
energy source. We hope it will make a considerable impact towards reaching our global
commitment of 100% renewable energy and climate neutrality by 2030, as well as advancing
our industry’s sustainability goals. It’s important we support the growth of the market in Europe
for clean and reliable on-site power.”
Susanna Kass and Dr. Alberto Ravagni, Co-Founders, InfraPrime:
“The E2P2 clean energy standard is an inflection point for clean cloud providers to achieve
Carbon Neutral (Positive) cloud infrastructure on a global scale. InfraPrime is proud to lead in
this project on the creation of an open industry standard to support the global adoption of eco
edge prime power solutions with fuel cells across clean cloud infrastructure, to support
industries and applications at hyperscale.”
Dr Jon Summers, Scientific Lead in Data Centres, RISE:
“This decade is undeniably focused on building a future that is environmentally sustainable.
We all know that digitisation and data centres are key elements of this future, where innovation
is at the heart of our journey to our global 2030 goals. As researchers at RISE, we are invested
to be a strong part of the E2P2 team, to push the technology envelope and to transparently
demonstrate new sustainable approaches of prime power for the future digital infrastructure.”
Cosma Panzacchi, Executive Vice President Hydrogen, Snam:
“We are happy to contribute our know-how to the E2P2 alliance to help tackle the issue of
powering urban data centres with clean and competitive energy solutions. The concept of
connecting fuel cells to gas networks to power resilient urban and edge data centres
overcomes the need to have backup generation in such areas, thus reducing emissions as well
as noise impact. This project is part of Snam's efforts to foster the use of hydrogen to
decarbonise economic sectors, leveraging existing gas networks and sustainable technologies
like hydrogen-ready fuel cells.”
Massimo Bertoldi, CTO, SOLIDpower:
“SOLIDpower is proud to contribute to the E2P2 project with its proprietary Solid Oxide Fuel
Cell technology and systems. We strongly believe in the use of fuel cell generators for prime
power in data centres, offering a unique combination of energy savings and high power
reliability. Particularly, the E2P2 project is part of our efforts aimed to support the development
of clean, sustainable and renewable power solutions for application across the data centre
industry, contributing to reach ambitious climate goals and carbon neutrality by 2050 as
committed by Europe. We are excited to join the E2P2 consortium and kick-off this project.”
Dr. Klaus Lucka, Managing Director, TEC4FUELS:
“TEC4FUELS is a competence centre for sustainable liquid and gaseous energy carriers
(fuels) and operating fluids in technical systems. For the operation of the fuel cells, the
company contributes its know-how to the research project in the supply and purification of the
process gas medium and water. In addition, TEC4FUELS is developing a sensor-based fluid
condition monitoring system to monitor gas and water quality. The aim is to help reduce
system-related greenhouse gas emissions by optimising the operational reliability and service
life of technical components and increasing the efficiency of this subsystem.”
Giordano Albertazzi, President, Europe, Middle East and Africa, Vertiv:
“Digitisation and the data centre industry are growing at an increasing pace and thus it is even
more vital to fast-track our journey towards an environmentally sustainable future. This can
only be made possible by developing clean, innovative technologies such as fuel-cell solutions
to provide sustainable power for the digital world. Vertiv is proud to actively contribute to the
E2P2 proof-of-concept initiative and looks forward to providing next-generation power solutions
to its global customers”.
