New energy-efficient trend: DC in windmills

The German company WestfalenWind Group (an operator of turbines for generating electricity using wind) proposes a project to install data processing centers in the turbine masts. The WindCores project is aimed at deploying small data centers with a year-round work cycle. Servers and storage systems are provided by Fujitsu, whose positions in Germany are still quite strong, and the hosting of the equipment and the provision of cloud services is occupied by Green IT Systems.

Each wind turbine is installed on a mast with a height of 150 meters and a diameter of 13 meters. There are at least four protected compartments in the mast, each of which can receive server racks with a height of 62U. For example, Fujitsu is ready to provide Primergy servers and Eternus storage systems for this. Almost all the energy to power the equipment (up to 92% of the required level) comes directly from the turbine, which is almost a utopian indicator in the field of hosting.

A backup from two independent grid operators according to the N + 1 redundancy scheme is provided as backup power sources. The turbine still delivers the generated electricity to the network, so that the power to the data center in the absence of wind or when the wind power exceeds the allowable value will be provided in any case. The reliability of the developed system is 99.98% within the Tier III standard.

According to the designers, the proposed solution in the form of small data centers with low heat dissipation can be an effective step towards distributed computing. In addition, such centers will lead to a decrease in atmospheric carbon pollution, and their maintenance and maintenance costs are relatively low. True, almost all old and suitable for placing data centers wind turbines are located in Europe and partly in North America. But this does not prevent the construction of specially designed rooms around the world.