NTT America, a subsidiary of Japanese telecom giant NTT, has selected Bloom Energy Servers to power its new Silicon Valley data center.
A natural gas pipeline delivers biogas from a California dairy farm to power the innovative fuel cell technology and deliver clean energy to the data center in San Jose.
NTT said it installed five of Bloom Boxes, which are priced between $700,000 and $800,000 each.
The five servers have a total generating capacity of 500 kilowatts (kW), or enough to power 500 average homes or five 30,000-square-foot office buildings.
NTT said that these cells will produce 4.2 million kW annually and will reduce the company’s carbon dioxide emissions by 1.6 million pounds, the equivalent to planting approximately 4,000 trees each year.
Bloom’s fuel cells, which generate power as a result of a chemical reaction rather than the burning of fossil fuels, are typically more expensive than drawing power directly from the grid. However, modern data centers require large amounts of reliable power, which the Bloom servers provide.
Recently, many large companies, such as ATT, Adobe, Walmart, Google and Ebay have opted for Bloom’s clean, reliable energy. Besides adding reliability and reducing green-house gas emissions, having Bloom’s servers on site also brings companies what’s known as distributed generation.
Distributed generation means electricity is generated where it will be used, allowing a company to reduce the amount of energy loss due to transmission across power lines, increasing efficiency and trimming costs.
