Modular Solutions Can Meet a Data Center’s Immediate Expansion Needs When the Local Power Grid Can’t

As services increasingly move online and onto the cloud, the data center market is being asked to rapidly expand construction across the nation to meet the demand for storage and processing power. Data centers are a vital component of companies’ and consumers' daily operations as they are the central location for IT operations and equipment, and they help form the backbone of critical internet infrastructure. Email, cloud document storage, e-commerce transactions, backup data, streaming media, mapping – practically everything that people go to the internet for daily requires data centers to process information. The recent embrace of artificial intelligence for consumer-facing applications is already leading to increased power demands in the years ahead, as remote computers perform much of the processing power for algorithms.

The increased power demands of data centers are especially relevant for the world’s major cloud providers, whose data centers help process daily online tasks for millions of users and provide bandwidth to companies for managing their data needs. Ultimately, the increasing demand for data services has led to situations where the surrounding infrastructure cannot meet their expansion needs. Electrical grids have a finite capacity at all stages of power delivery – from a basic supply and demand balance to how much electricity transmission and distribution equipment can send to individual buildings. When buildings like data centers require more power than their utility allotment, their power needs outpace what their connection to the grid can supply.

The rapid rise of demanding applications like artificial intelligence is leading to situations where data centers need expanded capacity quicker than utilities can upgrade local infrastructure to meet the increased power needs that come with more server racks. Since utility upgrades can be a time-consuming and long-term process, immediate and flexible temporary power solutions can help meet the increased power needs of a data center expansion while the utility improves permanent T&D infrastructure. Many data centers have on-site power generators, but these are reserved for specific cases of grid failure – using them for extended periods outside of a grid interruption can lead to a breach of warranty, a violation of local emissions regulations, and eliminates the redundancy created by the back-up generators, putting data centers’ stability and uptime at risk. In cases where sufficient grid power is available, the lasting supply chain constraints on electrical distribution equipment such as transformers and switchgear have prevented many data centers from stepping the power down and distributing it safely onsite.

The solution, then, comes in the form of a temporary, demand-side power supply that a solutions provider can quickly deploy to meet the expanded power needs and scale up or down as needed. In one scenario, Aggreko, a leading energy company, designed a solution that essentially created a microgrid operating in island mode to provide extra power during periods when a data center’s power usage would outstrip the 200 MW threshold set by the utility. The solution included forty-eight low-emissions 1200 kW Tier 4 Final generators, supplying 48 MW of additional continuous power that the data center could tap into at any time. Off-grid self-generation solutions like this one can be turnkey, and indeed, in this scenario, it included all the necessary interconnection and transformation equipment. This example also demonstrated the environmental advantage of using the latest technologies that are now available in the market, as the data center was able to realize reduced emissions of 94% on Nitrogen Oxides (NOx), 90% on Carbon Monoxide (CO), 90% on Total Hydrocarbons (THC) as compared to standard Tier 2 generators.

The result of the modular power project, in this case, was that the data center was able to meet the increased demand for its services, with the operator installing additional server racks in the near term instead of having to wait until local infrastructure could meet the permanent energy needs of the expansion. The project demonstrated the data center applications of temporary, easily deployed & scalable generators, which can meet the immediate power needs of expanding data centers. In the years ahead, as cloud computing and artificial intelligence place ever greater demands on data centers, more will need temporary power solutions or centers will have to wait to install additional capacity until local infrastructure can catch up. In the absence of a modular solution, data center operators will have to stand idly by while competitors increase capacity while they’re constrained by power limitations.