Project Cuts Emissions By Putting Data Centers Inside Wind Turbines

CNN reports on a new German-based project called WindCORES that operates data centers inside existing wind turbines, making them almost completely carbon neutral. 'If you look at the sustainability pyramid, the highest form of sustainability is using things that already exist,' said Fiete Dubberke, managing director of windCORES, which was founded in 2018. From the report: The concept uses existing wind turbines to power data centers on site, while fiber optic cables provide a constant internet connection. Planning for a project like this began 10 years ago, Dubberke said, when WestfalenWIND realized the electricity grid was too weak to handle the huge capacities of electricity being produced by its wind turbines during peak wind hours, resulting in their windfarms being switched off due to grid security issues. WindCORES estimates that the unused electricity generated during this period could power one-third of all German data centers.

Its solution was to bypass the 'middleman' (the grid) altogether, and instead, power IT servers from directly inside the large concrete wind turbine towers. Each tower is 13 meters wide and could potentially hold server racks up to 150 meters high. As the area is mostly empty space, Dubberke calls the concept a 'no-brainer.' According to Dubberke, an average of 85-92% of the power needed to sustain a windCORES data center comes directly from the host turbine. When there is no wind, electricity is obtained from other renewable sources, including solar farms and hydroelectric power plants, via the electricity grid. 'The German data center average is 430 grams of CO2 released per kilowatt hour,' he said. 'For windCORES, it is calculated at just 10 grams per kilowatt hour.'

Since launching, windCORES has acquired around 150 clients through co-location and cloud solutions, from very small start-up companies to bigger, more established ones, such as Zattoo, a leading carbon-neutral Swiss TV streaming platform with several million monthly users. Zattoo joined windCORES in 2020, when it moved one of its six data centers into a wind turbine in Paderborn. Currently, 218 channels are encoded with windCORES, and by the end of next year, the company hopes to relocate more existing servers to the wind farm, making it Zattoo's main data center location. WindCORES has recently opened a larger, second location called 'windCORES II' at the Huser Klee windfarm in Lichtenau, Germany. Built for a new large automotive client from Munich (the name is yet to be revealed), it is over three levels and around 20 meters high.

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