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Wärtsilä – Business Models for Data Centres

Reduce your carbon footprint, increase profitability, and reduce entry barriers to an optimal solution

Wärtsilä’s solutions are designed to meet the needs of your data center, providing a competitive advantage in place of using local electricity supply. The flexibility and efficiency of our engines enables you to maximize the usage of renewables and to choose from back-up or baseload fuel alternatives like clean natural gas or biogas.

Gas-fired power generation offers a small carbon footprint, but also emits very low levels of local pollutants. Gas engines are so efficient that you can use extra capacity to generate revenues, as excess capacity of the electricity can be sold to the grid, providing options for new business models for data center operators. Wärtsilä solutions can be owned and operated by an independent power producer or local utility, enabling you to sell power or backup capacity without a large up-front investment.

Business Models for Data Centres:

Today, a modern gas engine energy center can be used to open up completely new business models for data center owners and operators. Three different models for three different scenarios. Take a look at what works best for you – and enable the transition to 100% renewables use on site.

Business model 1: Merchant plant + emergency power

  • An independent power producer (IPP) or the data center operator builds a gas engine power plant at the data center site.
  • IPP sells electricity to the market on merchant basis. Data center purchases electricity from the market.
  • Data center operator and IPP sign an emergency supply contract. In case of grid failures, the data center receives emergency power from the engine power plant.

Benefits:

  • No need to buy and maintain emergency diesel power generators
  • Gas engines provide back-up power with less emissions than would be caused by testing and operating diesel equipment
  • No investments in unused assets – equipment used for emergencies is also serving other purpose

Business model 2: Primary power

  • IPP or data center operator builds a gas engine power plant at the data center site.
  • Power plant serves as the primary source of power for the data center, providing the required redundancy. The redundancy capacity is used to sell electricity to the market.
  • Optional heat recovery systems are used to generate cooling power for the data center. Waste heat can also be sold for local district heating.

Benefits:

  • Power for the data center is generated from natural gas at competitive cost and with low environmental footprint.
  • Using hear recovery for data center cooling may reduce electricity demand.
  • Data center operator gets more flexibility in choosing the site. Strong power grid is no longer required.
  • New source of revenue – selling electricity and heat to the market
  • Avoid investing in emergency-only diesel generators

Business model 3: Primary power

  • IPP or data center operator builds a gas engine power plant at the data center site.
  • Power plant serves as the primary source of power for the data center, providing the required redundancy. The redundancy capacity is used to sell electricity to the market.
  • Optional heat recovery systems are used to generate cooling power for the data center. Waste heat can also be sold for local district heating.

Benefits:

  • Easier to choose a site for the data center – grid connection availability is no longer a constraint.
  • Faster data center development – construction of a gas engine power plant takes less time than arranging and building a high-capacity grid connection.
  • Using gas engines makes any additional back-up power system unnecessary.

To meet with Wärtsilä – register to attend DataCentres Ireland

If you have any questions, leave a comment below:

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