Euro data centre club throws itself to the li-ions – to the delight of battery vendor members

The European Data Centre Association (EUDCA) has published a whitepaper extolling the virtues of li-ion batteries - a tech that is still veiwed with suspicion by some bit barn operators. It should, however, be noted that alongside 23 data centre operators, members of the organisation - which represents the commercial interests …

[Pascal Monett]

"sacrifice a part of their battery capacity to support the power grid, and get paid"

I suppose it's another brilliant MBA scheme. I'd love to see the discussion on that.

"Hey, we have all this power doing nothing, we could monetize it by supporting the power grid."

"Great idea, what happens if the grid goes down though ?"

"That virtually never happens, the grid has its own securities."

"Then why did we buy all those batteries in the first place ?"

From my point of view, those batteries are not just sitting there, they are poised to be available if the power grid goes down for any reason. That is their only job.

To give them another job is to ignore why they are in place and, in doing so, diminish their ability to respond to their primary duty.

But hey, I don't get a bonus either way, so have fun.

[Natalie Gritpants Jr]

Re: "sacrifice a part of their battery capacity to support the power grid, and get paid"

And probably just before the grid goes down due to being overloaded, the electric company have taken all they can from your batteries and now you want to use them they are at their lowest.

[Cynic_999]

Whats the advantage of Li-Ion in a UPS?

The article mentions their "many advertised benefits" but describes only that they are not so temperature sensitive. As what? I was unaware that lead-acid batteries are particularly temperature sensitive. It states that it brings the power closer to the server room and allows batteries to be placed on the rack. Why is that an advantage? The thing with electricity is that you can have the generating plant miles away from the place the power is needed, and given that that space in a server room is more valuable than most other parts of a building, why waste it on batteries? Our main and backup UPS systems are on a different floor to the server room and unlike the servers do not require air conditioning (albeit they will hopefully only need to supply power for a few minutes until one of the two diesel generators kick in).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Whats the advantage of Li-Ion in a UPS?

Power density is another advantage, if you have limited space whether inside or outside your server room. Since a lot of datacenters have been shrinking their footprint due to server consolidation and cloud migration, batteries could be brought into the server room and the space they are now using freed up.

[IareFlash]

Explosion anyone?

The one big disadvantage to Li-ion batteries is they love to explode. And we all know how careful sparkies can be in a DC. After all most DC power issues are not down to grid failure but down to a dropped screwdriver across two terminals (no I never did) so the likelihood of a scenario of a Li-ion battery setting on fire because of miss - ahem - handling is pretty high!