An industry that loves acronyms could soon see a new one — DC2G.
It would be an acronym not for the second generation of DC comics but for data center to grid, and if it becomes widely used, Google likely will play a contributing role.
Data centers need lots of power and must run all the time. Data center operators traditionally have accounted for that by keeping diesel-powered generators and lots of fuel at their facilities in case the power flow to them is disrupted for some reason.
Google, however, is trying a new tack at its data center in St. Ghislain, Belgium. The Alphabet subsidiary is conducting a test to see if lithium-ion batteries can be used instead of a diesel generator as power backup for 3MW of live, production computing load there, according to a story by Yevgenly Sverdlik for Data Center Knowledge. Google plans to leverage a 10,000-panel solar array at the data center for the battery, CleanTechnica reported.
While Google hopes the test will demonstrate that batteries can be used instead of diesel generators to provide backup power for data centers and that data centers with large scale energy storage can help balance local grids, it has bigger plans for DC2G. (I created the acronym, so I’m going to use it even if it never catches on with anyone else.)
“Worldwide, we estimate there are over 20 gigawatts of backup diesel generators in service across the data center industry, representing a massive opportunity to deploy cleaner solutions,” Joe Kava, Google’s vice president for data centers wrote in a blog post. “Our project in Belgium is a first step that we hope will lay the groundwork for a big vision: a world in which backup systems at data centers go from climate change problems to critical components in carbon-free energy systems.”