E2P2 receives funding from Clean Hydrogen Partnership

The Clean Hydrogen Partnership will provide € 2.5 million to E2P2 project to develop low-carbon fuel cells to power data centers.

The EcoEdge PrimePower (E2P2) project is a novel proof-of-concept initiative aiming to develop and demonstrate low environmental impact fuel cells that provide economic and resilient prime power solutions for the data centre environment.

E2P2 is a consortium of seven companies: Equinix, InfraPrime, Rise, Snam, SolidPower, Tec4Fuels and Vertiv. The project aims to explore an innovative integration of solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFC) with uninterruptible power supply (UPS) technology and lithium-ion batteries to provide resilient and clean primary power to data centre deployments and other infrastructure. Using natural gas SOFC as a prime power application will eventually drive green hydrogen in fuel cell application for backup and prime power systems.

Justin Dustzadeh, CTO at Equinix, said, “The E2P2 project enables us to demonstrate a novel architecture for power generation, distribution and storage.”

Equinix will leverage its experience and team to deploy and test the experimental E2P2 fuel cell platform at a dedicated space within one of its Milan, Italy, data centres. The team expects to develop a commercially viable product that will facilitate a greener future for data centres across Europe and the world.

Bart Biebuyck, Executive Director, Clean Hydrogen Partnership, said,  “Projects such as E2P2 are absolutely essential in offering solutions to un-tap markets with great potential and contribute to our ambitious EU climate targets.”

Eugene Bergen Henegouwen, President at Equinix, added, “The E2P2 project hopes to be a breakthrough in making data centres more environmentally sustainable worldwide.”

Susanna Kass and Dr Alberto Ravagni, Co-Founders of InfraPrime, commented, “The E2P2 clean energy standard is an inflection point for clean cloud providers to achieve Carbon Neutral (Positive) cloud infrastructure on a global scale.”

Dr Jon Summers, Scientific Lead at RISE, noted, “This decade is undeniably focused on building a future that is environmentally sustainable.”

Cosma Panzacchi, Executive VP at Snam, stated, “The concept of connecting fuel cells to gas networks to power resilient urban and edge data centres overcomes the need to have backup generation in such areas, thus reducing emissions as well as noise impact.”

Massimo Bertoldi, CTO of SolidPower, said, “We strongly believe in the use of fuel cell generators for prime power in data centres, offering a unique combination of energy savings and high power reliability.”