NEWS : Google Thinks Data Centers, Armed With Batteries, Should ‘Anchor’ a Carbon-Free Grid

Google's data center in St. Ghislain, Belgium

A large-scale battery plant at its Belgium data center will provide backup power and help balance the grid.

Google is hoping to kill two birds with one stone (and potentially a third one) in a pilot it’s about to launch at its data center campus in Belgium.

The Google data center team in St. Ghislain will use lithium-ion batteries instead of a diesel generator as power backup for 3MW of live, production computing load – a first for Google.

Mainly, they hope to demonstrate that: a) batteries are a viable replacement for traditional data center backup generators, and b) a data center outfitted with a large-scale energy storage plant can help balance its local electrical grid, Maud Texier, Google’s carbon free energy lead, told us.

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