Apart from working on different technologies Microsoft Corporation has never shirked from its responsibilities towards society, a personal mantra of Bill Gates’ that remains part of his company. The multinational corporation has given away millions of dollars and hours to charity work as well as for the betterment of tour world and the environment. The software giant has now revealed that they are planning to build a small data centre adjacent to a plant that treats waste water in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
According to the details given out by Microsoft, they are planning to power this small data centre through a fuel cell that will use biogas from the water plant in order to learn how to attain clean power resources for the company’s other data centres. This means that the experimental data centre will help Microsoft in attaining net zero carbon emissions from the energy used by its data centres, a tremendous coup in our increasingly social conscious world. In addition to this, the corporation will also find out how data centres can become less dependent on the power grid through this experiment.
Discussing this new “Data Plant” plan Senior Research Project Manager of Microsoft, Sean James said that this project is a “a symbiotic relationship between a water plant and data centre.” Microsoft boasts that this project represents “the first zero carbon data centre.” It will also be the first of its kind to use biogas straight from a fuel cell in order to power the entire facility.
This 200kW data centre measures 10 feet by 20 feet within a container that is strategically built just few feet away from the Dry Creek Wastewater Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The system in this plant is automated, and as a result is more efficient than systems in which gas is carried manually. In this automated system, pipes take away methane, created from the waste water and then clean it before pumping it automatically into the fuel cell.
The fuel cell that Microsoft is using for this Data Plant is a 300 kW cell from FuelCell Energy. When this fuel cell receives biogas it runs it over plates that are covered with catalysts and produces electricity chemically.
This entire mechanism, which includes the biogas system, fuel cell, cleaning process, IT pack and servers will cost this American corporation $8 million. The company is planning to start its construction as soon as possible so they will be able to run it by next spring.
If this experimental project remains successful, Microsoft will use the same technology to power its other data centres and build fuel cells. Moreover, it will also help other internet based companies like Google, EBay, Yahoo and more to follow their footsteps and build such data centres and control the emission of carbon.
Besides this, the experiment will also allow the corporation to make an attempt to build micro data centres near densely populated areas that are close to waste water plants so as to bring the computing close to the large number of users.
Another valuable part of this project is that Microsoft plans to hand it over to the local institution of higher education and the city after running it for 18 months, so they too can run tests on it and figure out how they can use it at big scale.
Source: Gigaom
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