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The tech giant emphasises its green credentials by spending millions to move closer towards becoming carbon neutral.

16:00, UK, Wednesday 21 November 2012

Waste food products stocked to produce methane before conversion into a biogas

Microsoft is developing a new data centre that will run entirely on biowaste, becoming the first to have a zero carbon footprint.

Its facility in Wyoming will be completely independent of the grid and will recycle common waste by-products to power the firm's cloud services sustainably.

Microsoft says it is investing around £3.5m ($5.5m) in R&D on the pilot project, which will be located at the Dry Creek Water Reclamation Facility in Cheyenne.

It adds the data plant will demonstrate the benefits of integrating the collection, treatment and consumption of biogas at source to create an efficient use of renewable energy.

Reusable by-products like biogas can be extracted from waste water treatment plants, farms, fuel refineries and landfill sites.

The computer giant points out that biogas fuel sources are typically uneconomical to recover and convert to energy that can be used at grid level.

However, senior research programme manager Sean James said: "By capturing and reusing biogas on premise with our data centres, we will be able to significantly reduce their carbon emissions while producing beneficial uses at the same time.

"This project will study new methods for providing a stable, clean, scalable and economically-efficient power source for data centres that could become a best practice for use by other industries in the future as well."

Biogas is produced by the anaerobic digestion or fermentation of biodegradable materials such as manure, sewage, municipal waste, green waste, plant material and crops.

Biogas is made up of methane and carbon dioxide, but may also have small amounts of hydrogen sulphide, moisture and other compounds.

Mr James said the Cheyenne Data Plant is optimised to create biogas at source.

He explained: "First, trace contaminants such as siloxanes, as well as moisture are filtered out.

"Next, a molten carbonate fuel cell converts the remaining methane and CO2 into electrical energy without combustion and the associated pollutants. Lastly, the energy produced is used to power the modular data centre.

"Electricity that is not consumed by (the) data centre is returned to the wastewater treatment plant to minimise any wasted capacity in the system."

The completed plant must be capable of handling all the sudden spikes and dips in online service traffic that the company's existing centres have to deal with.


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