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Dec 14, 2021
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – December 14, 2021 – Equinix, Inc. (Nasdaq: EQIX), the world's 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
Quotes
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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”.
Additional Resources
About Equinix
Equinix (Nasdaq: EQIX) is the world’s digital infrastructure company, enabling digital leaders to harness a trusted platform to bring together and interconnect the foundational infrastructure that powers their success. Equinix enables today’s businesses to access all the right places, partners and possibilities they need to accelerate advantage. With Equinix, they can scale with agility, speed the launch of digital services, deliver world-class experiences and multiply their value.
About the Clean Hydrogen Partnership
The Clean Hydrogen Partnership—the successor of the Fuel Cells and Hydrogen Joint Undertaking (FCH JU)—aims to accelerate the development and improvement of advanced clean hydrogen technologies. It builds on 13 years of cooperation between public and private sectors through the FCH JU to help innovative technologies graduate from the experimental phases to be exploited by industry, businesses and consumers for the benefit of Europe. The three members of the partnership are the European Commission, fuel cell and hydrogen industries represented by Hydrogen Europe and the research community represented by Hydrogen Europe Research.
Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from expectations discussed in such forward-looking statements. Factors that might cause such differences include, but are not limited to, the challenges of acquiring, operating and constructing IBX® data centers and developing, deploying and delivering Equinix products and solutions; unanticipated costs or difficulties relating to the integration of companies we have acquired or will acquire into Equinix; a failure to receive significant revenues from customers in recently built out or acquired data centers; a failure to complete any financing arrangements contemplated from time to time; competition from existing and new competitors; the ability to generate sufficient cash flow or otherwise obtain funds to repay new or outstanding indebtedness; the loss or decline in business from our key customers; risks related to our taxation as a REIT; and other risks described from time to time in Equinix filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In particular, see recent Equinix quarterly and annual reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, copies of which are available upon request from Equinix. Equinix does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking information contained in this press release.
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