Dive Brief:
- Energy Vault will bring up to 2 GW/20 GWh of “firm, primary power” to data center properties RackScale develops beginning in 2026, the companies said Wednesday.
- Energy Vault will deploy its multistory B-Nest battery enclosures, which offer more than eight times the energy density of traditional ground-mounted battery energy storage systems, it says. They “can provide each data center with full primary power for 10+ hours,” it says.
- The news is the latest in a series of announcements in recent months by technology companies, data center operators and energy firms focused on providing large data centers with firm electricity.
Dive Insight:
The partnership between Energy Vault and RackScale will allow RackScale to “avoid issues created by the shortage of available grid power seen across the industry” and accelerate its data center project development timelines, the companies said Wednesday.
Grid interconnection wait times are more than three years in most regions, and the timeline from initial interconnection request to fully built power plant increased from less than two years for projects built between 2000 and 2007 to more than four years for projects built from 2018 to 2023, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said in April.
“The safety characteristics, energy density and economics of the B-Nest solution are ideally suited to meet the needs of the data center market,” Energy Vault Chief Commercial and Product Officer Marco Terruzzin said in a Wednesday statement. Those factors and its space efficiency makes it suited to “urban settings where data center demand and utility grid congestion are at their highest,” Energy Vault and RackSpace said.
B-Nest is a modular, technology “agnostic” solution that uses structural engineering intellectual property Energy Vault developed for its gravity energy storage systems, the company says. Its potential 10-hour duration is significantly longer than the one- to four-hour durations typical of ground-mounted lithium-ion battery storage systems.
The B-Nest installations could also generate supplementary revenue for the data centers by allowing them to participate in utility demand response programs while ensuring full power deliverability “when paired with an interruptible utility power contract,” Energy Vault said.
News of the partnership between Energy Vault and RackSpace comes as data center developers, operators and tenants race to procure large amounts of high capacity-factor power. Gas-fired generators are expected to meet much of the additional near-term demand, boosting U.S. data centers’ gas consumption by 3 billion cubic feet/day to 6 Bcf/d, S&P Global said in October.
Earlier this month, Entergy announced plans to build three combined-cycle gas turbine plants with a combined 2,260 MW of capacity in Louisiana by 2029 to power a new, $10 billion Meta data center, which would be the company’s largest, to be built nearby.
Meanwhile, major oil and gas companies may get into the power business to satisfy data center demand, ExxonMobil and Chevron executives said recently. ExxonMobil is in the early stages of designing a 1.5-GW gas-fired plant outfitted with carbon capture technology, according to The New York Times, and Chevron is “working on this as well,” Chevron New Energies President Jeff Gustavson told an investor conference this month.
Also this month, Google and Intersect Power announced a partnership to develop data centers colocated with gigawatt-scale wind, solar and battery installations that can combine for capacity factors approaching 80%. The first project could be operational by 2026 and fully completed by 2027, the companies said.
Over the longer term, large technology companies hope to meet data center power demand with emerging “clean firm” technologies like advanced geothermal and small modular nuclear reactors. A deal between Meta and Sage Geosystems could begin providing geothermal power to the tech company in 2027, while Meta, Google and Amazon have all announced plans to power data centers with SMRs beginning in the 2030s
