Why fuel cells can't get started

First National of Nebraska, number 3 on Computerworld's ranking this week of the nation's almost green Information technology operations, has been using fuel cells to provide upward to 340 kilowatts of make clean power to its information center for more than eight years. So why hasn't the technology caught on? No one has overcome the toll and complexity issues nonetheless, although i startup'southward efforts expect promising.

First National uses fuel jail cell engineering based on a phosphoric acid process that produces electricity for most 15 cents per killowatt hour. The national average for grid power is x cents per kWh, and you don't have the issue of maintaining your own power found. First National can get power from the grid for about 5 cents per kWh, but the high availability aspect of fuel prison cell technology allows the visitor to meet uptime requirements for its credit card processing operations without investing $100 million in a backup data heart. "Information technology'south a huge, huge number, says CIO Ken Kucera. "I'thousand not a Chase or Citibank that tin [beget] three or four data centers." For Kucera, fuel jail cell technology was part of a high availability, "seven nines" design necessary to allow information technology to compete with those much larger players with deeper pockets.

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In the 8 years since Outset National opened its information centre, no other business has chosen to run its information center on fuel cells, co-ordinate to Peter Gross at consultancy EYP Mission Critical Facilities Inc. Given the progress It has seen in the last viii years, you'd think that fuel cell technology would have evolved to the point where it was price effective for at least a small segment of the data centre market place.

That hasn't happened for several reasons. The biggest remains cost.

Because the technology doesn't respond well to sudden changes to power demands, backup systems are needed. "If there is a chiller starting up or some other device that requires a lot of additional power, the fuel cell, because of the chemical reaction required, doesn't respond fast enough and the voltage tends to collapse quickly," say Gross. To bargain with that, big flywheel generators are used to provide transitional power until the fuel cells can become upwardly to speed. "These are fairly expensive devices that demand to exist placed in serial with the fuel cells," Gross says. And they accept upwards a lot of space. The entire organisation at Commencement National takes up most the same foursquare footage as a tennis court, he says.

Using flywheels is more environmentally friendly than using chemic batteries in UPSes. When compared to UPSes, flywheels don't generate hydrogen, they're easier to maintain and take upwardly less space. But they stor less energy and provide backup power for a much shorter duration, since stored energy is released while the flywheel spins down.

Maintenance is also expensive on fuel cell systems, Gross adds.

Several companies are working on alternative fuel cell technologies. Perhaps the nearly well known is the proton commutation membrane applied science used in some automobiles. But the nigh promising for data center power, says Gross, is Bloom Free energy'due south solid oxide applied science. He says the company is close to producing a fuel cell capable of delivering about 100 kilowatts of ability at a price that could go far commercially viable in a few years.  The challenge with the solid oxide procedure is that the reaction produces temperatures in the range of 600 to 1,000 degrees Centigrade, and that has produced bug with corrosion. Bloom claims to take overcome those bug and says it has been able to mass produce its design. The starting time tests will likely take place in California and New York, where tax incentives and loftier utility rates create a proving ground on which to refine the design and outset edifice manufacturing economies of scale. If all goes well, Gross says Bloom could be offering a fuel cell organisation that produces electricity at a comparable cost to utility power within the next two years.

Robert L. Mitchell writes on a wide range of topics, including analytics, emerging technologies, light-green Information technology and data centers.

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