Energy Efficient Data Centers Are Coming For Your Fossil Fuels

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Top Trump advisor Elon Musk is reportedly less than impressed with a newly launched firm called The Stargate Project, which plans to pickle the US in new data centers over the next four years. Perhaps it’s just as well that the $500 billion Stargate construction plan proceeds more slowly than anticipated. A delay will provide grid managers with some much-needed breathing room to manage the ballooning demand for electricity in the US. Given enough time, emerging technology solutions for data centers will come into play as well.

Data Centers And The Energy Storage Solution

The US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory is among those forecasting stormy weather unless something is done about the energy-sucking habits of data centers. “By some estimates, data center energy demands are projected to consume as much as 9% of US annual electricity generation by the year 2030,” NREL notes.

Researchers at the lab have been exploring the use of underground thermal energy storage to reduce data center cooling needs during peak hours. The aim is to improve water conservation along with energy efficiency, too.

“Data centers typically cool computing equipment by blowing cold air over the components using a water-cooled fan coil or by directly cooling the computing equipment with cool water,” NREL explains, noting that cooling systems account for up to 40% of total energy use at data centers. “The peak demand of data centers on the hottest hours of the year are a much higher percentage and represent a large cost for the U.S. electric grid,” the lab notes.

NREL is focusing particular attention on the use of Cold UTES (short for cold underground thermal energy storage) systems to relieve the grid from peak demand, reducing the need to build new gas peaker plants and other peak-demand infrastructure.

“Stored thermal energy has the potential to generate electricity and directly produce heat that can be used by industrial processes. The energy can also be kept in cold storage reservoirs to be used for building and industrial cooling,” NREL explains.

Make That A Long Duration Energy Storage Solution For Data Centers

On January 17, NREL outlined their plans to make the case for Cold UTES by modeling the costs and benefits over a 30-year period. “Our expectation is that a Cold UTES system can provide a long-duration energy storage and industrial-scale cooling solution that is commercially attractive and technically viable for data centers,” explains Jeff Winick, the technology manager at the Energy Department’s Geothermal Technologies Office.

Unlike conventional lithium-ion battery storage systems that only last for a handful of hours, Cold UTES systems fall into the category of long duration energy storage. The Energy Department has set the bar for long duration at a minimum of 10 hours and up. A Cold UTES system can offer the “and up” end of the scale by delivering stored-up wind and solar energy on a seasonal basis, well beyond increments of hours or days.

The big question is how to get excess renewable energy into an underground storage facility in the first place. NREL launched a consortium back in 2023 to explore two options for recharging geologic energy storage reservoirs.

Concentrating solar power is one option under consideration. That would delight CSP stakeholders, who have been haunting the shadows of the commercial market while conventional solar farms dot the US landscape. The NREL consortium has tapped the firm Premier Resource Management to develop a case study using CSP to charge thermal storage systems that repurpose derelict oil and gas wells.

Although thermal storage in shallow aquifers is fairly common in the US and Europe, NREL notes that commercial-scale use of depleted oil and gas reservoirs has yet to emerge. They aim to prove that it makes sense.

“Not only will utilizing this resource promote significant cost savings, but it will also encourage oil and gas industries to participate in the transition to a decarbonized energy economy by leveraging existing capital and assets,” the lab explains (give them a break, they wrote that back in 2023).

In a document filed last February, PRM described the project as a 10-megawatt demonstration leading to a 400-megawatt, commercial scale facility with more than 1,000 hours of energy storage capacity, to be located in Kern County, California.

PRM notes that its CSP will use trough-style parabolic solar collectors, which focus sunlight on a fluid running through pipes. The fluid will transfer the solar heat to water sourced from the reservoir, and the hot water will be injected back underground for storage until needed for generating electricity.

“The project will demonstrate that traditional hydrocarbon developments can be effectively replaced by renewable geothermal energy within 10 years, while improving the original value of the land by orders of magnitude for every year the system operates,” PRM notes.

Heat Pumps To The Rescue, Too

For the other option, the Houston firm Earthbridge Energy is tasked with deploying its “GeoBattery” on shallow aquifers, to store both hot and cold water.

“Their cycle is a pumped thermal solution that separates water out into hot and cold reservoirs, then subsequently extracts the stored energy in the temperature gradients to generate electricity,” explains the Electric Power Research Institute. “As a pumped thermal energy storage system, this technology takes advantage of low storage temperatures and is expected to achieve a high round-trip efficiency (RTE) for a thermal energy storage system.”

The Space-Based Way To Cut Data Center Energy Demand

Aside from long duration energy storage systems, the data center energy crunch is also giving rise to a raft of new solutions. One of the more futuristic ideas involves shooting data centers into low Earth orbit, where they can harvest solar energy 24/7 and take advantage of the ambient air for cooling.

That’s not so futuristic after all. The space solar field has transferred itself from a niche occupation to a hive of activity in recent years. In one recent development, the US data center services startup Flexential has hooked up with the lunar infrastructure and resiliency-as-a-service firm Lonestar Data Holdings Inc. on a project leading to the construction of a data center on the Moon.

As a precursor to that rather ambitious project, Lonestar plans to launch a data center named “Freedom” into orbit. “Unlike a traditional data center, Freedom is solar powered and naturally cooled leveraging Solid-State Drives (SSDs) and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) edge processor.

“Space-based data centers are also becoming particularly critical as government and commercial organizations seek to protect essential data against large-scale disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, floods, warfare, and acts of terrorism, that could impact terrestrial facilities,” Flexential notes.

No word yet on whether or not The Stargate Project will start spending some of its $500 billion to shoot data centers up into the air. So far, the focus is on Earth-bound campuses, beginning with one in Texas.

President Trump hosted a White House event for The Stargate Project on Tuesday, though his top advisor was not so convinced. As reported by Politico among other news organizations, hours after the event Musk posted “They don’t actually have the money” on his social media platform X (formerly Twitter). Later, Musk posted that one of the key investors, SoftBank, has “well under $10B secured.”

“I have that on good authority,” Musk added.

Very interesting! If you have any thoughts about that, drop a note in the comment thread.

Photo: The Energy Department is exploring underground, long duration energy storage systems to manage energy demand from the nation’s growing fleet of data centers (Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL).