Microsoft explores green hydrogen fuel cells for data centers

With digital data usage exploding during the COVID-19 pandemic, Microsoft Corp. is preparing to build a new fleet of carbon-free data centers across the world to support virtual working and entertainment trends that the company believes will persist long beyond mass vaccinations.

"What we are witnessing is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during a Jan. 26 call with investment analysts that highlighted its surge in demand for cloud-based products.

In a far-reaching operational shift, the company wants to equip its next generation of data centers with clean energy technologies that make it possible for them to interact with the grid during normal operations and to run independently on zero-carbon resources when the primary power grid fails.

Microsoft plans to cover all of its grid power consumption with renewable energy power purchase agreements by 2025. But it and fellow technology giants such as Google LLC and multitenant data center specialists such as Equinix Inc. still design their data centers largely with diesel-fired backup power systems. That has resulted in pushback from environmental officials in Silicon Valley and other areas where new data centers are sprouting rapidly.

The "data center of the future" will be both a consumer and producer of clean power for the broader electric system, offering services like frequency response, demand response and peak shaving, according to Mark Monroe, head of advanced data center development at Microsoft.

The company, which plans to wean its data centers entirely off diesel by 2030, will run tests in 2021 on using a 3-MW hydrogen fuel cell in a demonstration that could become a building block for data centers that are "part of the larger hydrogen economy," Monroe said Jan. 27 during a panel discussion hosted by the Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association.

That is roughly the size of the individual diesel backup units built into larger arrays operating at Microsoft data centers. The work builds on previous experiments in 2019 and 2020 using a 250-kW fuel cell, including powering data center servers for 48 consecutive hours.

Microsoft is exploring designs that include onsite electrolysis machines to create green hydrogen from low-cost solar and wind farms to supply the renewable energy-sourced molecule to the fuel cells, according to Monroe. "It's possible we can consume [renewable] power that would otherwise be curtailed," he added.