Powering Data Centres Before Grid Connection

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We talk a lot about data centres in this column. Providing power in data centres is becoming a defining problem for the industry at the moment. Here, we generally look at solutions that reach from the mains supply to the chip, but there is another area of data centres that is also challenging designers – getting power to the data centre in the first place.

New data centres, especially those that are intended to provide AI services, are straining the power grids in many countries. In some places, such as Ireland, data centres accounted for approximately 21% of the country’s total metered electricity, a figure that is projected to rise to around 30% by 2030. In response to this increasing demand, EirGrid, the national grid operator of Ireland, has imposed a de facto pause on new data centre connections in the Greater Dublin Area, which is expected to last until at least 2028. Amsterdam has also imposed a pause, and other cities, such as Frankfurt, London, and Paris are also seeing major pressure on their grids. That huge demand for energy from data centres pushes up prices, and can also cause grid instability and potentially affect power quality. Governments around the world are trying their best to increase generation and improve the grid, but this takes time, and the demand from data centres is now.

The owners of data centres are not willing to take a loss and pause their operations to wait for grid connections, and they are now looking to other solutions to power their facilities. In some extreme cases, there is talk of building nuclear reactors and other electricity generating power plants next to new data centres, which would ease strain on the grid, but those are for the largest and most energy hungry facilities. Other operators are investing in smaller gas or diesel powered electricity generators to provide power, both in the short term until there is a grid connection, and in the longer term to provide resilience against grid problems.

Lenaik Andrieux is the General Manager for Power Systems in EMEA, India & Australia at Rehlko, a company that spun-out of Kohler nearly two years ago. He describes the separation from the parent company as a way of regaining focus, saying, “independence has helped us focus on our core markets. In Kohler, the power division was just a small part of a much larger entity. Now, we know that we are purely an energy resilience company. Our portfolio is also pretty clear in that, with small engines and generators. That focus has enabled us to invest significantly in our capacity to serve the data centre industry. The ramp up has been pretty significant in terms of the demand and the building of infrastructure, and the only way for us to participate at the level we wanted was to get investors, increase our capability, and invest in our direct services.”

Part of that investing in services has been the acquisition of the Wilmott Group, Rehlko’s distribution partner in the UK for the last 30 years. The company already has subsidiaries in France, Germany, and Spain, and it has now decided that going directly to customers would also be preferable in other key markets, such as the UK. Andrieux expanded by saying, “what has become obvious, is that in any large infrastructure project, customers want you to take full responsibility of the design, the technical solution, the product delivery, the management, the commissioning, and then service through the life of the product, and even potentially the revamping of that facilities. A lot of data centre work takes our core generator product and delivers a full power plant around it. That's what we already do in the other countries. The acquisition of the Wilmott group, uniquely positions us in the UK to provide an end-to-end value cycle from design to delivery.”

Part of the reason that customers want full ownership from suppliers is that each design is unique. Andrieux explains by saying, “data centre operators would love cookie cutter designs to make scaling up easier. Standardizing on one design and copying and pasting around the world, but, that really has never worked. The world is far from being uniform. More and more data centres are close to people. If you're in the middle of London, or in the middle of Iowa, emission levels and noise levels dictate that the design needs to be extremely different. Although we have building blocks that we reuse systematically, we see a lot of variability in the designs from one customer to another, and even from the same customer in different locations. It remains an extremely customized business. As an example, we have a customer in Ireland that has secured a former factory because the grid is already there, so they built the data centre inside. It is pretty much tailored design every time.”

As for trends in the industry, Andrieux emphasizes that the quicker data centres are operating, the better for operators, “Speed to power is the major concern for the data centre operators at the moment. It has become more difficult in certain parts of the world to get that grid connection, so we've seen a lot of demand for temporary power solutions, whether with gas turbines or gas generators. They might have to wait for a year before getting grid connection, and have to install a temporary solution to get up and running. They will need generators anyway for back-up power. Another second trend we are seeing is a move to higher voltages. Staying at lower voltages means higher currents, and thicker conductors. The cost of copper bars becomes much more expensive. We've seen a lot of data centre design, especially with AI, moving to high voltage loops. That requires us to sync high voltage generators to get the loop at the right level.”

https://www.rehlko.com/