Microsoft has reached a brand new milestone in its effort to ditch diesel in favor of cleaner vitality at its information facilities. The firm introduced right this moment that it efficiently examined a hydrogen gasoline cell system highly effective sufficient to interchange a standard diesel-powered backup generator at a big information heart.

As a part of its plans to sort out local weather change, Microsoft needs to utterly give up utilizing diesel as gasoline for its backup energy methods by 2030. To hold information facilities operating 24/7, no matter energy outages, every heart is supplied with batteries that quickly kick in till backup mills are fired up.

For now, these mills run on diesel, releasing air pollution and greenhouse gasoline emissions. Hydrogen gasoline cells, in distinction, mix hydrogen and oxygen to generate electrical energy and launch warmth and water as a substitute of air pollution. Big batteries may also run on clear vitality however usually don’t have the capability to energy an information heart for quite a lot of hours at greatest.

That’s why Microsoft is fairly enthusiastic about hydrogen as a gasoline and the milestone it simply reached: designing and testing a three-megawatt hydrogen gasoline cell system that may energy round 10,000 laptop servers at an information heart (or 600 houses, for comparability).

“What we just witnessed was, for the datacenter industry, a moon landing moment,” Sean James, Microsoft director of knowledge heart analysis, mentioned in a blog post right this moment.

It’s been a protracted journey to get up to now, and there’s nonetheless a protracted street forward earlier than the entire backup mills at Microsoft information facilities could be pollution-free. Microsoft began tinkering round with fuel cell technology in 2013. But, on the time, the fuel cells it was working with nonetheless relied on pure gasoline.

Image: Microsoft / John Brecher

By 2018, the corporate had turned its consideration to proton alternate membrane (PEM) gasoline cell expertise that may run on pure hydrogen. But Microsoft says it couldn’t discover any suppliers making PEM gasoline cell methods giant sufficient for its information facilities. So Microsoft requested Plug Power, consultants in hydrogen gasoline cell methods, to construct a customized one. Microsoft and Plug examined the system over a number of weeks in June. After efficiently testing the prototype, Plug is engaged on making a streamlined business model. Microsoft says it can set up the system at a analysis information heart subsequent, with no specified goal date but for introducing the expertise at one in every of its stay information facilities.

There’s an entire lot of hype round hydrogen as a cleaner different to fossil fuels proper now. The Biden administration has an $8 billion plan to construct out hydrogen manufacturing “hubs” within the US, for instance.

But that hype can be garnering some criticism. While hydrogen gasoline cells may solely produce warmth and water, the method of creating the hydrogen gasoline itself can get soiled. Today, most of it’s made with pure gasoline, a fossil gasoline. Microsoft examined its prototype utilizing so-called “blue hydrogen,” which is made with pure gasoline paired with carbon seize expertise that’s supposed to attract down a lot of the carbon dioxide emissions that come from utilizing fossil fuels.

In the longer term, Microsoft hopes to make use of solely “green” hydrogen that’s made with renewable vitality as a substitute of fossil fuels. But that’ll probably depend upon elements exterior of Microsoft’s management — like whether or not the Biden administration and different governments prioritizing clear vitality can convey much more renewable vitality on-line, construct out the infrastructure to supply and transport inexperienced hydrogen, and make green hydrogen cost-competitive with dirtier fuels.