Leading the Way to Sustainable Data Centers
Why Solar Microgrids?
What is a solar microgrid?
A solar microgrid is a small, localized power grid where an energy customer is connected directly to a solar power plant instead of receiving power from a regional or national grid, which are usually powered by traditional energy sources.
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We started CleanAI as a solar microgrid company because the AI-driven boom in power demand is bigger than anything seen in human history and traditional utilities are unable to meet it. The problem is so acute that customers in a range of energy-intensive industries are facing 5-12 year wait times to connect new facilities to traditional power sources.
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Solar microgrids allow customers to quickly meet their energy needs with an affordable, efficient, resilient, and environmentally sustainable power source that they control, rather than waiting years to connect to expensive and environmentally-damaging grids or investing enormous amounts of time and capital to build their own power plants.
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Simply put, solar microgrids are the fastest, cleanest, most reliable, and lowest-cost power solution for data centers and other energy-intensive industrial facilities.
Fast
It takes us only 15 months to start power ramp and 24 months to complete a 1 GW solar microgrid. Gas plants for this scale need up to two years for air permits as a major emissions source and new order turbines are 5+ years lead time.
Affordable
Power from a solar microgrid costs significantly less than energy sourced from a traditional gas-powered grid, even compared to Texas’ famously affordable electricity prices. When the microgrid achieves grid connection it provides a hedge against grid energy prices spikes because even though the engines are normally off, then can turn on during rare energy price spikes driven by scarcity conditions.
Resilient
Solar microgrids offer resiliency in the face of energy disruptions. Traditional power networks are vulnerable to everything from demand spikes to natural disasters and even geopolitical events. Solar microgrids are standalone, on-site power plants, helping to protect data centers from external disruptions.
Clean
Even with gas firming 50% of the annual load, the solar microgrids emit a fraction of the smog-producing pollutants compared to traditional power sources.
Detailed benefits of solar microgrids
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Using solar to displace gas consumption allows us to double the size of the data center without triggering human health concerns and permitting delays associated with a Title 5, major emissions source.
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Combining photovoltaic solar power and battery storage (PV+S) with an off-grid gas plant allows us to reduce the gas power plant size by 40-60% compared to a gas only operation.
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Using PV+S hybridized with the gas plant lowers the total Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) of a data center when compared to either gas-only or the electric grid.
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The local emissions from operating the microgrid’s gas backup engines year round are lower than a grid-connected diesel backup system operating only the mandatory maintenance hours.
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When a solar-battery-gas microgrid becomes grid connected it can lower the local emissions by more than 95% when compared to diesel backup.
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The solar-battery-gas microgrid has higher reliability than diesel generator sets due to eliminating diesel trucking and replacing it with a firm gas pipeline contract.
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Solar has a lower cost than the marginal cost of running gas.
The CleanAI advantage: experience
Our team has, so far, built more than 6 gigawatts (GW) worth of solar, battery energy storage, and gas power plants. We have built microgrids with renewables, battery, and gas ranging from 10 megawatts (MW) to several 50 MW projects. These are complex projects requiring significant technical and commercial expertise, and this complexity is one of the main reasons why solar microgrids for data centers have yet to be fully realized. Thanks to our deep experience in this complex field, the CleanAI team is perfectly positioned to be an industry leader in solar microgrid power for data centers and other energy-hungry industrial facilities. By working with CleanAI, companies don’t have to worry about managing complicated and capital-intensive energy projects that are outside of their core expertise. CleanAI is developing data center microgrid sites in key data center markets and bringing our microgrids to existing data center projects that are in the long wait for power. We build and manage microgrids tailored to each customer’s needs, helping the compute users to save energy costs, lower pollution, and maintain focus on what they do best.
How CleanAI makes it work
CleanAI’s deep understanding of the microgrid market comes from the fact that our team works closely with data center developers, industry working groups, and equipment manufacturers to understand typical load characteristics in a variety of settings. CleanAI has also built a microgrid optimization software platform that relies on decades of real weather data to show we are not modeling just a “typical meteorological year” but actually covering all corner cases. We don’t merely respond to spec sheets, we model the performance of key components, such as inverters and energy management systems (EMS), before selecting them for site installation and we then conduct rigorous hardware-in-the-loop testing and pilot site testing for the final equipment configuration.
Where CleanAI makes it work
Solar-battery-gas microgrids are most economical in sunbelt states but we are also finding them to be economically viable for AI data centers in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest.