Data centres as flexible grid resources get a boost
US controllable load data centre developer Lancium has raised $150 million in funding to advance its business.
The funding round was led by the South Korean multi-national Hanwha Solutions, a provider of clean energy solutions and owner and operator of the solar PV manufacturer Q CELLS.
Other participants included Novawulf and SBI Holdings among others.
“This financing allows us to embark on the next high-growth phase of our business, and we are encouraged by the support of a broad range of investors from the energy and cryptocurrency sectors,” said Michael McNamara, co-founder and CEO of Lancium.
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“We have an ambitious growth strategy with over 2,000MW of capacity in development across our Clean Campuses, and significant capacity expected to come online in the year ahead.”
Lancium’s proposal is to develop ‘Clean Computing Campuses’ at critical points on the grid that can function as controllable load resources utilising the company’s Smart Response platform to resolve congestion and provide ancillary services.
While the concept of utilising data centres for flexibility is not new, Lancium appears to be the first to put in place a development pipeline, with Texas the first state targetted.
Following a September groundbreaking, the first such centre is currently underway at Fort Stockton. Completion of the first 25MW stage is scheduled for Q1 2022 with the facility reaching full capacity of 325MW by year end 2022.
The initial application at the centre will be for Bitcoin mining with others including high throughput computing and other energy-intensive applications.
In a white paper published in October, Lancium finds that while growth in data centres supports the development of renewables, they would need to be operated flexibly to achieve carbon emissions reductions, shedding up to 15% of their load annually in order to do so.
