With a zero-emission fuel like green hydrogen, a small data centre is powered via fuel cells. At the same time, its waste heat for district heating is used via a liquid cooling technology.
This WEDISTRICT’s demo site aimed to recover the excess heat from the data centres by liquid cooling technology. This technology uses a dielectric liquid where the commercial servers can be completely immersed and transfer their waste heat to the liquid. Via heat exchangers this heat could then be further utilized to preheat the fuel cell container. The fuel cells were used to boost the system to temperatures suitable for supplying the Luleå’s district heating. The fuel cells produced direct current electricity power as well as a huge amount of waste heat for potential recovery.
Addressing target audiences and expressing needs
- We are sharing our knowledge
Organisations that can support with increasing the maturity of this solution. Especially in the area of storage of thermal energy.
- Others/ No specific audience
- Research and Technology Organisations
- Academia/ Universities
R&D, Technology and Innovation aspects
Proof of concept was succesful.
Need to work on further integration of fuel cells and data centres [for district heating networks].
Scale up to a megawatt, which would cover a range of edge infrastructures.
Since the whole set-up is very quiet, very few fans are required, need to check if such a set-up, based on fuel cells, would be best used in an urban edge data centre, located close to digital users and heat demand.
The system can be deployed at datacentres with sinilar size.
