A recent survey of data center executives revealed that over half have already deployed modular data centers, and 99% plan to in the future. Made from prefabricated units and preconfigured equipment, prefabricated modular data center systems (PMDCs) can be deployed in a much wider array of locations than traditional facilities, and offer multiple benefits: reduced costs, faster construction, greater customization, and easier scaling of the data center’s equipment and systems over time.
How Diverse Chemistries Strengthen the Battery Supply Chain
April 27, 2023
Battery energy storage helps ensure the reliability of mission-critical infrastructure such as data centers, transportation systems, and increasingly, the grid itself. So in a world of disrupted supply chains, it’s high time to safeguard battery supply chains by expanding the use of multiple battery types and chemistries. Applying the best-fit battery chemistry for each job simultaneously reduces risk and improves the performance of our battery energy storage infrastructure.
The White House has publicly recognized batteries’ crucial role in our grid and communication systems. Last March saw the president invoke the Defense Production Act to spur domestic mining and processing of minerals used to make batteries for electric vehicles and energy storage facilities. In May 2022, the Department of Energy announced that $3.16B from the $65B Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would go towards (among other activities) supporting domestic critical mineral supply chains used in battery production. The Inflation Reduction Act, enacted last summer, provides battery cell manufacturers with tax credits for batteries produced domestically. The Administration’s praiseworthy efforts will help lower costs and improve our competitive position for lithium materials and battery chemistries. However, we must do more to secure our battery supply chains.
To ensure widely available energy storage solutions, we need to diversify the use of battery chemistries and materials. A variety of battery chemistries have recently emerged that use more readily available materials, looking beyond lithium. Adding other battery types to our energy storage mix relieves stress on the overall battery material supply chain, preserving those limited resources for applications that require their exact performance qualities.
For example, lithium-ion batteries are a good fit for electric vehicles because they have high energy density relative to their weight. They can store vast amounts of energy in a lightweight package, then release that energy slowly over the course of several hours (even days) of use. This allows them to power cars for long periods of time without overburdening the vehicle and makes them ideal for mobile phone applications, where lightness and long-term battery power also matter.
ln contrast, some energy storage applications require the opposite: high-power density batteries that can deliver massive amounts of electricity for a short time period. For instance, data center backup power systems require batteries that can power the entire data center and prevent catastrophic data losses in case of a power shortage – but only for a few minutes, until the backup generators kick in. Such applications benefit from power-dense batteries such as nickel-zinc, which are designed to safely handle critical short-duration needs for high electricity loads.
There are other battery types that offer attributes best suited for certain applications. Flow batteries are able to grow energy storage capacity without affecting the power rating. Flow technology stores energy in tanks of liquid electrolytes, separating the energy storage section of these batteries from the power production section. So increasing a flow battery’s energy storage only requires increasing the tank size, not buying a new battery. This easily increased energy storage capacity makes them a promising option for grid-scale, long-duration energy storage. And like nickel-zinc, these batteries provide greater safety than lithium because of their inherent non-flammability.
The Powerful Benefits of Nickel-Zinc Batteries for Data Centers
Learn MoreOther battery chemistries in development include zinc-manganese dioxide,ion, and rechargeable aluminum – each with their own set of benefits (safety, availability of materials, affordability, and longevity) and suitable applications.
Nickel, zinc, aluminum, iron, and other alternative base materials are often much more available and less expensive than lithium, and can require a less intensive mining process. Using more widely available, less expensive materials for stationary applications strengthens the battery supply chain and associated production capacity.
This is particularly crucial in light of lithium’s increasing demand as the electric car and grid storage markets grow. Lithium demand is projected to triple from 2020 levels by 2025, risking global shortages. For battery-dependent operations to continue functioning smoothly, lithium batteries should only be used where they’re truly needed – for example, electric cars.
Since other battery chemistries like nickel-zinc are better suited for backup power and short duration ancillary services, using them in those cases will relieve the growing demand for lithium. By focusing specific chemistries for the applications they’re best suited for, we can use a wider range of batteries overall and thus ease price increases and supply shortages.
No single battery chemistry can be the perfect fit for all of the continually expanding battery applications – vehicles, transportation systems, grids, data centers, and more. A greater selection of chemistries lets operators prioritize specific advantages such as greater sustainability, space conservation, maintenance costs, reliability, and safety. Microgrid developers and users have already realized this – they’re increasingly turning to more diverse battery chemistries, and even using multiple types of batteries to fulfill different functions in the same microgrid.
Supporting a wide number of chemistries allows optimization for different applications, eases pressure on supply chains, and helps reduce costs throughout the industry. If we want to strengthen the battery supply chain – ever more urgent as the demand for energy storage continues to rise – we must support the development and adoption of alternative chemistries.
Previously published by Renewable Energy World
The Sustainability Advantages of Nickel-Zinc Batteries
April 4, 2023
Nickel-zinc (NiZn) batteries are a more sustainably sourced and environmentally friendly alternative to other battery chemistries.
A Climate Impact Profile by Boundless Impact Research and Analytics compared the environmental impact of lead-acid, lithium and NiZn batteries, demonstrating that NiZn has advantages with lower GHG emissions, water footprint, energy footprint, carbon payback time, material use, and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).
Combining these metrics, NiZn had a 9.4 out of 10 impact score on its overall performance, with higher scores representing higher positive environmental impact. The cradle to grave carbon footprint of a nickel zinc battery is significantly less than lead-acid or lithium batteries.
Here’s a more detailed breakdown of each element on the chart:
- Material Use
NiZn batteries use common, highly available, conflict-free materials which are also highly recyclable. Nickel and zinc are respectively four and five times more abundant in the earth’s crust than lithium and lead. In addition, while lead exposure is a global health concern and lithium’s reactivity to air and water makes it a fire hazard, nickel and zinc are non-toxic and non-flammable. - Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Nickel-zinc batteries’ lifetime greenhouse gas emissions are four times lower than lead-acid and six times lower than lithium-ion emissions. Since nickel and zinc sourcing require fewer emissions and NiZn battery manufacturing carbon footprint is lower, users purchasing $1M of NiZn batteries save 148,255 tons of CO2e – a 537 percent improvement over lithium, and a 1,700 percent improvement over lead-acid batteries. - Carbon Payback Time
Carbon Payback Time (CPT) measures the time it takes for a battery to offset its cradle to gate carbon footprint. NiZn chemistry’s CPT is between 0.16 and 0.21 years – 400% faster than lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries. - Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs)
Emitted as gases from solids – including those used to produce lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries – VOCs are infamous for causing short-and long-term adverse health effects. A healthier alternative, NiZn batteries do not use VOCs in production. - Water Footprint
Even including water requirements for raw material extraction, a NiZn battery still demands 96% less water from cradle to gate than the average lithium-ion battery. - Energy Footprint
The energy footprint, manufacturing to gate, for NiZn is 23-33% less than that of lithium-ion batteries and lead-acid pure-lead batteries.
ZincFive’s commitment to sustainability and the environment extends beyond its products.
ZincFive is a member of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), as part of the company’s continued commitment to safeguard human rights, communities impacted by mining, and the broader environment.as part of the company’s continued commitment to safeguard human rights, communities impacted by mining, and the broader environment. IRMA works to advance responsible mining practices, providing third-party verification and certification against comprehensive environmental and social criteria for all mined materials. Membership in the initiative is the latest development in ZincFive’s commitment to promote ESG standards within the company for the benefit of all stakeholders.
Climate Impact Profile
Boundless analyzed the climate impact of the ZincFive nickel-zinc (NiZn) battery technology, taking into account key performance indicators such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, water footprint, energy footprint, and hazardous material requirements, scoring ZincFive’s NiZn batteries at 9.4 with 10 representing the highest positive environmental impact.
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Three Ways to Improve Data Center Sustainability
March 21, 2023
In today’s information and technology-driven economy, data centers are fundamental to maintaining the day-to-day operations that keep businesses, organizations, and governments running. They act as centralized information hubs and enable the storing, processing, and dissemination of data and applications — vital to the operational continuity underpinning contemporary economic growth.
The intense processing power behind data centers inevitably means that they demand significant energy resources and produce heat waste. In fact, data centers are so energy intensive that they account for 2.4% of global electricity usage and 0.5% of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the United States, which contains more data centers than any other country.
The outsized environmental impact of data centers has garnered increasing attention in recent years as businesses face growing pressures from investors, consumers, and regulatory agencies to integrate sustainability into their operations, and the industry is responding. For many organizations, data centers comprise a significant portion of their overall emissions (either scope 1 or 3, depending on ownership), making the issue quite salient.
The good news is the variety of ways in which data centers can upgrade their facilities to meet evolving pressures, hedge against uncertainty, and become more sustainable, efficient, and highly cost-effective. Effective methods include optimizing airflow dynamics, adopting modular design, and switching to alternative battery technologies like nickel-zinc.
Optimizing Cool Airflow
The industry-recognized optimization standard for data center infrastructure (“hot aisle/cold aisle”) was pioneered in 1992 by IBM’s Robert Sullivan — an internationally recognized engineer — and remains a practical way of boosting existing cooling technology without needing additional capital investment. In this specific configuration, cabinets containing processors are placed so that the front of one will never face the back of another, where heat exhaust escapes.
Rearranging a data center in this manner effectively creates alternating rows of cold supply and hot return air, reducing energy usage. It’s also important to reinforce the separation of alternating aisles with physical barriers that seal off gaps for air and to clear airflow obstructions — often poorly placed cables — from intake and exhaust openings. Doing so will deliver the highest-quality airflow dynamics, guaranteeing reduced energy costs, improved corporate sustainability metrics, and greater operational reliability.
Batteries and Cooling Combine for Data Center Sustainability
Read BlogAnother economic — albeit geographically and logistically restrictive — way data centers can optimize their airflow is by making use of free air cooling. As the name suggests, free air cooling is a process whereby external ambient air temperatures are used to cool data centers’ processors via heat exchange. The caveat of this cooling method is that it’s location-dependent — and many of the most attractive places for data centers to locate (i.e. big tech hubs) don’t have the required climatic conditions.
Mountainous and some northern hemisphere regions are especially effective for free air cooling, as they boast low and stable temperatures year-round.
Modular Data Centers
PMDCs’ ability to add and replace components as needed provides several environmental benefits. Since they don’t need to be designed on a massive scale on location, they generally have smaller footprints, more efficient power and cooling options, and the ability to easily replace equipment with more climate-friendly alternatives such as nickel-zinc batteries. Some modular data centers can even be built in existing buildings, lowering the construction footprint even further. As the survey shows, data center operators plan to take full advantage of modular designs’ financial and environmental benefits in 2023 and beyond.
Sustainable Backup Batteries
Batteries comprise an integral part of information technology but are often overlooked when it comes to a data center’s sustainability directives. Since even a few seconds of data center downtime can disrupt operations around the world, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems are essential to maintain uptime during a power outage. These UPS systems must contain backup batteries, which present a key opportunity for contributing to sustainability goals.
For example, because nickel and zinc are four and five times more abundant in the Earth’s crust than lead and lithium, and boast more sustainable mining processes, nickel-zinc batteries have six-times the GHG avoidance compared to lithium-ion, and four-times relative to lead-acid. They also reduce overall water usage, eliminate volatile organic compounds during manufacturing, and are non-flammable.
Additionally, nickel-zinc allows for higher operating temperatures, offering reduced cooling requirements and resulting in energy savings. In many cases, the UPS is rated to operate at up to 104°F (40°C) or higher, but the battery operating temperature limits the ability to increase temperature and reduce cooling costs in that space. Fortunately, nickel-zinc can tolerate higher temperatures, thus providing an opportunity to reduce cooling costs and improve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and sustainability.
The Powerful Benefits of Nickel-Zinc Batteries for Data Centers
Read BlogUnsurprisingly then, nickel-zinc batteries have achieved the highest climate rating of 9.4/10 according to Boundless Impact Research and Analytics’ analysis of environmental and performance-based factors for battery chemistries commonly used in data centers. This is one of a few key reasons why Corscale recently announced that it will make use of nickel-zinc chemistry in its uninterruptible power supply system.
Conclusion
As major consumers of energy around the world, data centers have proactively taken it upon themselves to become leaders in reducing emissions, and are well-positioned to continue meeting the increasingly stringent environmental demands of investors, consumers, and regulatory agencies in the years to come. Though it’s not a silver bullet solution, the positive economics of airflow optimization, modular design, and alternative battery chemistries offer impactful, accessible, and low-risk ways of improving data center sustainability.
Previously published by Data Centre Solutions
4 ways nickel-zinc batteries can save data centers money
December 1, 2022
Data center operators face continual pressure to deliver more with less: to improve data centers’ reliability, safety, and sustainability, all while working under economic constraints.
In this attempt, many have overlooked the uninterruptible power supply (UPS) system – but now that thoroughly tested nickel-zinc (NiZn) batteries have proven themselves on the market, they offer an opportunity to deliver all three benefits in one cost-effective package.
These batteries improve data centers’ reliability, sustainability, and safety, all while simultaneously delivering cost savings. Here’s how:
1. Smaller battery footprint = Reduced infrastructure costs
Space is at a premium in data centers, as precious square footage is prioritized for profit-making equipment such as data storage and servers. For infrastructure such as UPS systems, the less space they take up, the better.
This is where nickel-zinc batteries shine. They’re the highest power density batteries available for data centers, with about twice the power density of lead-acid batteries (the most common form of backup battery). This gives them the ability to support a large power demand for a short period of time, with a small footprint.
During a typical data center outage, the generator comes online in under a minute and supports the data center for the length of the outage, so the UPS battery is only required to transition the data center from utility to generator-supported operation.
A NiZn battery system nearly halves the space needed for batteries compared to traditional lead-acid and newer lithium ion solutions.
Nickel-zinc batteries’ smaller size and weight delivers multiple financial benefits because they not only open up more floor space for revenue-generating equipment, but also lower the capital cost of building data centers by reducing the space needed for battery storage.
2. Greater reliability = Fewer maintenance costs
Nickel-zinc batteries’ financial advantages go beyond a smaller space footprint: their greater reliability can save data centers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This is because UPS failures are tied to expensive outages. Research from The Uptime Institute has found that outages are becoming longer and more costly, with one in five organizations reportedly experiencing a significant outage in the past three years.
However, 43 percent of outages in a data center are caused by the failure of the UPS system itself. Lead-acid batteries are often the culprits: they fail open or with a high impedance path, which prevents the battery from supporting the critical UPS load.
Nickel-zinc batteries’ greater reliability makes them ideal replacements for lead-acid batteries. First, they’re better suited to endure stress, especially varying temperatures. Second, their alkaline chemistry means that unlike lead-acid batteries, they do not sulfate over time. This extends their operating life to fifteen years – three times as long as lead-acid batteries’ lifespan.
Third, nickel-zinc batteries improve battery string reliability. When a cell in lead-acid or lithium batteries fails, it creates an open circuit that halts string operation. This results in two unwelcome scenarios: power backup failure for the entire battery string, and the operator having to pay for an expensive emergency maintenance event.
In contrast, a weak or depleted cell in a nickel-zinc battery remains conductive, which means the battery continues to discharge and carry the load. This means all that’s needed in the case of a weak or depleted NiZn cell is a simple battery replacement at the next planned maintenance cycle: little cost, and no operational impact.
Due to their greater resilience against environmental stressors, extended lifespan, and battery string reliability, nickel-zinc batteries help data centers protect themselves against the high costs of power backup failures.
3. Safer battery chemistry = Lower infrastructure, shipping and installation costs
Compared to lead-acid and lithium chemistries, nickel-zinc batteries’ greater safety lowers energy storage infrastructure as well as costs for battery shipping and installation. This safety stems from their non-toxic materials, lower shipping weight, lack of thermal runaway, no transportation restrictions, and ability to ship in energy storage systems completely assembled.
These characteristics make them easily shippable, with no special safety provisions needed – unlike shipping for lithium batteries, which have the potential for thermal runaway and require additional precautions and related expenses.
Once shipped, nickel-zinc batteries are also easily installed in both traditional and modular data centers. Due to their inflammable nature, they need no protective equipment, which reduces safety-related construction costs compared to the other battery types. Some battery cabinets also allow NiZn batteries to act as a drop-in replacement for lead-acid batteries, which lowers the barriers to replacing lead-acid with NiZn batteries.
4. Attract more customers with greater sustainability
Boundless Impact Research and Analytics carried out a Climate Impact Profile comparing the environmental impact of different backup battery chemistries, providing excellent information for data centers and their customers as they report Scope 3 emissions.
This profile revealed nickel-zinc batteries’ significantly lower impact on the environment across all six metrics of a battery life cycle analysis: carbon return on purchase (CROP), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon payback time (CPT), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), water footprint, and energy footprint.
Put together, these environmentally friendly characteristics give nickel-zinc batteries the highest score for sustainability: 9.4 out of a possible 10.
Data center users are under pressure – and are increasing pressure on their data center operators – to report and reduce their impact on the environment. By offering an avenue to contribute towards sustainability goals, data centers can attract more customers and investors through their advantages in terms of environmental impact.
The (financial) power of good chemistry
Nickel-zinc UPS battery chemistries outperform lead-acid and lithium-ion solutions in performance, space footprint, reliability, safety, sustainability, and – as a result of these – cost effectiveness.
Their characteristics free up data center space and budgets for developing new capacity and services. These advantages change UPS and battery backup from a mere necessary overhead, into an opportunity to improve financial performance.
This post originally appeared in Data Center Dynamics
Batteries and Cooling Combine for Data Center Sustainability
November 21, 2022
For data center operators, the challenge of mitigating high temperatures is all too familiar. Critical electronic and electrical components, such as servers and uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems, generate high amounts of heat, raising the temperature of the rooms they’re housed in. Unfortunately, these high temperatures can result in shortened equipment lifespan, safety issues, and voided product warranties.
Recommended operating temperatures for data center server rooms range from 60 and 82°F (16 to 28°C), with the optimal temperatures for newer servers near the high end of this range. In contrast, lead-acid batteries require a battery temperature of approximately 77°F (25°C), with no potential for reduced cooling levels through higher operating temperatures.
This limitation has become particularly challenging, as the frequency and severity of high temperature weather events has been increasing due to climate change. High temperatures can even result in outages, which can directly cripple various critical operations that rely on the data these facilities manage. As a result, data centers dedicate large amounts of their operating budgets towards facility cooling, and on average, 40% of a data center’s energy consumption goes into powering its cooling and ventilation systems.
Strategies taken by data centers to keep temperatures down include the optimization of cool airflow and the use of liquid cooling. Some data centers operate in low temperature, mountainous regions — such as the Wyoming Hyperscale White Box Aspen Mountain project. The geography of such a data center lends itself to cost effective cooling techniques but is not a universally available solution.
Battery chemistries that allow for higher operating temperatures offer reduced cooling needs, resulting in energy savings. In many cases, the UPS is rated to operate at up to 113°F (45°C), but the battery operating temperature limits the ability to increase temperature and reduce cooling costs in that space. Fortunately, some alternative battery chemistries for UPS systems can tolerate higher temperatures, thus providing an opportunity to reduce cooling costs and improve Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and sustainability.
While traditional lead-acid battery solutions often limit temperatures to 77°F (25°C), alternative battery chemistries such as lithium-based and nickel-zinc have a higher ambient operating temperature range – and longer lifespans as well. Modern lithium-based batteries can operate up to 82-86°F (28-30°C). Nickel-zinc batteries offer the highest operating temperatures of popular battery chemistries in the data center market today, with a maximum limit of 95°F (35°C) for regular operation. Some nickel-zinc batteries’ warranty terms even allow for temperature excursions up to 122°F (50°C) for up to 5% of their operating life. This allowance for excursions to high temperatures assures owners that the battery warranty remains valid in the case of a cooling system breakdown and a temporary increase in ambient temperature.
These alternative batteries provide data center operators with the opportunity for increased operating temperature and cooling cost reductions without impacting the UPS. In particular, the higher operating temperature batteries such as nickel-zinc are often the safest, with no risk of thermal runaway. They also can offer additional benefits in terms of reliability and total cost of ownership.
The strategy of operating at higher temperatures with alternative battery powered UPS systems is most effective in prefabricated modular data center systems (PMDCs). In this design approach, prefabricated units are assembled together and outfitted with preselected, preconfigured equipment. A recent survey of 228 data center executives found that over half had already deployed PMDCs, while 99% shared that they have plans to use modular data center designs in the coming years.
As part of the increased use of PMDCs, UPS and battery systems are being positioned in containerized systems outside of the main data center facility. These modular designs pose an opportunity to create climate specific rooms for the UPS and battery systems themselves. By utilizing alternative batteries, these rooms can operate at higher temperatures and offer the combined benefits of lower CapEx for lower capacity cooling systems, and reduced OpEx over the life of the system. As high temperature events increase in frequency due to climate change, investing in battery systems that can withstand harsher environments in 10-15 years is a distinct advantage for facilities being built today.
Temperature flexibility in the battery and UPS space of data centers is an emerging strategy that has become possible thanks to the availability of alternative battery technologies. As these strategies are adopted, data centers can reduce cooling system investments, save on cooling costs over the system’s lifetime, and improve the PUE, sustainability, reliability and safety of their operations.
This post originally appeared in Data Center Frontier
The Powerful Benefits of Nickel-Zinc Batteries for Data Centers
October 31, 2022
Data centers contain all the information on which internet activities rely, forming the bedrock supporting our increasingly connected world. As a result, any data center power outage – no matter how short – can have a catastrophic impact on operations around the globe. That’s why reliable backup power matters so much.
But while data center operators need to meet this challenge of reliability, it’s far from the only factor they must consider. Data centers are also under pressure to manage costs, meet sustainability goals, and reduce space – especially as facilities increasingly move to urban environments.
Fortunately, there’s a way to address all these challenges at once. Switching out lead-acid and lithium-ion backup batteries for nickel-zinc batteries increases reliability, safety, and sustainability while simultaneously lowering costs and space requirements.
Nickel-zinc batteries’ crucial role in data center reliability
Since even a few seconds of data center downtime can disrupt operations around the world, uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems are essential to maintain uptime during a power outage.
Unfortunately, the very system meant to prevent an outage too often causes one; accounting for 37 percent of data center outages, on-site power failure is still the most common cause of significant data center outages. The majority of these on-site outages (53 percent) are caused by UPS failure, and often cost over $100,000 to repair.
Thus, UPS systems must contain backup batteries that perform reliably under any circumstances. UPS batteries must perform in paralleled strings to provide adequate power and run time to the UPS in the event of an outage. If any single cell in one of these batteries fails, the battery string does not operate, making the data center’s UPS unable to supply enough power and/or run time when an outage occurs.
However, cells in nickel-zinc batteries remain conductive even if weakened or depleted. This allows the battery string to continue operating and makes what would otherwise be an emergency into a simple note for replacement at the next planned maintenance cycle – no added maintenance costs or operational impact.
In the meantime, the data center’s UPS can still provide adequate power and run time to the data center if an outage occurs. This characteristic makes nickel-zinc batteries a strong option on the market for maintaining uptime and preventing costly outages.
Also, battery reliability can only last as long as the battery itself. With a 10-15 year operating life, nickel-zinc batteries have at least twice the lifespan of lead-acid batteries and one similar to lithium batteries. For example, ZincFive’s nickel-zinc batteries are designed to have a lifespan of 15 years and come with a ten-year warranty.
Nickel-zinc: More space, more profits
In addition to being more reliable, nickel-zinc batteries are also more power-dense than either lithium or lead batteries. Over a short time frame, they can discharge over twice the power that leading lithium-ion batteries would provide.
This makes them the ideal option for a data center UPS, whose goal is to keep the entire data center running temporarily until utility power returns or backup generators take on the power load.
Because of the power density of nickel-zinc batteries, fewer battery cabinets are required to support large UPS solutions. A mere four ZincFive battery cabinets provide an equivalent runtime at a megawatt of UPS as five lithium-ion cabinets or six lead-acid cabinets.
This frees up room in the data center for more revenue-generating hardware such as servers and storage, increasing the center’s profits as well as its reliability. In addition, the spacing requirements required by the NFPA for other chemistries is not required for chemistries that are inherently non-flammable like nickel-zinc.
Nickel-zinc helps sustainability & ESG goals
Organizations are under pressure – and are increasing pressure on their data centers – to report and reduce their impact on the environment. Boundless Impact Research and Analytics carried out a Climate Impact Profile comparing the environmental impact of different backup battery chemistries, providing excellent information for data centers and their customers as they report Scope 3 emissions.
This profile revealed nickel-zinc batteries’ significantly lower impact on the environment across all six metrics of a battery life cycle analysis: carbon return on purchase (CROP), greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, carbon payback time (CPT), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), water footprint, and energy footprint.
From the beginning of their lifecycle, nickel and zinc production are less harmful than lithium and lead production. They are respectively four and five times more abundant in the earth’s crust, and don’t require as environmentally harmful a mining process.
Nickel-zinc batteries’ life cycle GHG emissions are four times lower than lead-acid batteries’, and six times lower than lithium-ion batteries’. Their carbon payback time – the time required for emissions savings from the product’s use to offset the GHG from its production – is a mere 25 percent of lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries’ payback time.
In addition, both lead and lithium batteries use VOC’s (volatile organic compounds) in their production. These cause both short and long-term health problems, in addition to those caused by accidental lead exposure. In contrast, nickel-zinc batteries contain no VOC’s or other toxic elements. They can be used and recycled without dangerous exposure.
The Climate Impact Profile also reveals that over their lifetime, nickel-zinc batteries use 96 percent less water than lithium batteries and about 22-33 percent less energy than lithium and lead-acid batteries.
Put together, these environmentally friendly characteristics give nickel-zinc batteries the highest score for sustainability: 9.4 out of 10. That’s why sustainable data center Wyoming Hyperscale White Box chose ZincFive’s nickel-zinc batteries for its UPS needs. In addition, it’s worth noting that modular data centers are also good for the environment.
Safer data centers with nickel-zinc
In terms of safety, nickel-zinc technology has clear advantages over lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries. Unlike nickel-zinc, both of the latter include harmful VOC’s in their production and contain toxic chemicals that make handling and recycling them difficult.
Nickel-zinc batteries are non-toxic, nonflammable, and fail-safe. They do not exhibit thermal runaway, as proven through testing ZincFive’s batteries using the Underwriters Laboratories UL 9540A test method, and can withstand higher temperatures than lithium-ion. This makes them easier and safer to handle and ship, as well as guaranteeing more reliable performance.
ZincFive battery cabinets: An easy drop-in replacement
While nickel-zinc batteries’ characteristics give data centers more than enough reason to make the switch from lead-acid, one challenge often stands in the way – but with ZincFive’s BC Series UPS Battery Cabinets, it doesn’t have to.
The challenge comes from the large installed base of UPS systems designed to charge only lead-acid batteries. Since every battery chemistry has a different charge profile, getting most alternative battery types to charge in those UPS systems requires a costly and time-consuming reengineering process.
However, ZincFive’s battery cabinets negate this obstacle; it is the first BESS that allows nickel-zinc batteries to perform in an existing UPS system without the time and expense of additional modifications.
The battery cabinet’s intelligent charging system utilizes the existing lead-acid charging profile to fully charge the nickel-zinc battery, giving them backwards/forwards compatibility with systems originally designed for lead-acid solutions. This drop-in replacement allows data centers to easily harness the benefits of ZincFive’s nickel-zinc batteries.
‘The Power of Good Chemistry’: A reliable, sustainable, safe UPS energy storage system
When lithium-ion entered the data center market, its performance triggered a migration away from its lead-acid counterparts.
But as lithium-ion’s safety, reliability, and sustainability issues surface, nickel-zinc chemistry has proven ideal to solve those concerns while delivering an even smaller footprint. Nickel-zinc battery-powered technology offers high performance, market success, and many proven improvements on previous backup technologies.
When it comes to your relationship with the batteries in your facility, never underestimate ‘The Power of Good Chemistry.’
This post originally appeared in Data Center Dynamics.
5 Benefits of ZincFive Nickel-Zinc Batteries
September 7, 2022
Our electrified world demands safe, sustainable battery storage to maintain mission-critical applications like data centers and aviation. Zinc battery chemistry is a game changer for the energy space. Nickel-zinc (NiZn) batteries are the powerful, reliable, and safe choice for the future. In addition, as sustainability becomes a top priority across major markets and corporations, zinc battery technology emerges as the new “power player”, challenging its predecessors lead-acid and lithium-ion.
Here are five main reasons why we can safely make this strong statement:
- Higher power and smaller footprint: Nickel-zinc batteries have twice the power density of lead-acid batteries. For the same level of backup power, nickel-zinc is about half the size and half the weight. This shrinks your energy storage footprint so your can plate more batteries wherever they are needed. High power density means rapid charge and discharge rates so you can power the data center, capture renewable energy, control peak loads, and rapidly charge EVs.
- Reliability: Nickel-zinc batteries are reliable, they can take the heat, with their wide operating temperature range. Plus, an operating life up to three times longer than a lead-acid battery. Even a bad cell won’t stop a nickel-zinc battery from discharging, unlike lead-acid and lithium-ion batteries where a single cell failure, for example, can disable a storage system.
- Safety: While lead exposure is a global health concern and lithium’s reactivity to air and water makes it a fire hazard, nickel-zinc batteries are safe, non-toxic and non-flammable (they don’t exhibit thermal runaway). They can reliably deliver more power faster, at high temperatures, and do it safely, year after year. This means less protection, lower costs, and, most importantly, peace of mind.
- Sustainability: Nickel-zinc batteries are sustainable. They use common, highly available, conflict-free materials which are also highly recyclable. Nickel and zinc are four and five times more abundant in the earth’s crust, respectively, than lithium and lead. A third party expert analysis supports the sustainability claims. One of the leaders in innovation and delivery of nickel-zinc batteries, ZincFive, has partnered with an independent firm to conduct this analysis to demonstrate that nickel-zinc batteries have a significantly lower end-to-end climate impact than lead-acid and lithium batteries. As evident by the data in the report, nickel-zinc batteries ranked higher than lead-acid and lithium-ion chemistries in several criteria including avoided greenhouse gases (GHGs), carbon return on purchase and carbon payback time.
- Scalable: Using a sustainable supply chain also makes a technology more scalable. More common elements = more scalability. This means the ability to scale up deployment of production factories in less time. The technology can be produced using manufacturing lines already producing similar chemistries.
To sum it up, with long life, reliable operation and low maintenance, nickel-zinc batteries can lower the total cost of ownership, safely reduce energy storage footprint, all while maintaining complete safety and helping the environment.
Learn more about how nickel-zinc batteries and power solution redefine immediate power for data centers, intelligent transportation systems, industrial engine starting, information technology, microgrid and EV charging, and more.
Battery Energy Storage Trends for the Electrification of Everything
June 10, 2022
As we closed out the first quarter of 2022, the energy storage industry continued to show stunning growth. When scrolling through the news, reading studies, and attending events, one can’t help but notice how critical battery energy storage is to a myriad of markets and industries. As innovative technologies emerge at a breakneck pace, they reveal key trends in both market priorities and the sector’s current and future direction.
Sustainability Under the Microscope: Solutions Themselves Are Put to the Test
Energy storage has been, and will continue to remain, a key tool for those seeking to decarbonize. In order to meet their sustainability targets, companies and municipalities are turning to cleantech such as renewable energy, electric vehicles (EVs), and green buildings. All of these rely on batteries and other energy storage technologies to ensure their effectiveness and reliability. One key trend in this push towards sustainability is that the energy storage solutions themselves, including batteries, are not immune to questions concerning their environmental footprints.
For example, emissions tied to the footprint of batteries used in an organization’s facilities can be included in the carbon accounting for their operations. In the Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Protocol, energy storage systems fall under scope 1 and scope 3 emissions.
Accounting for Scope 1 emissions is often easier because much of the data is available within the organization. In contrast, Scope 3 emissions are more difficult to account for because they 3result from activities from assets neither owned nor controlled by the reporting entity itself. These emissions typically stem from the organization’s supply chain and their assets’ end of life process, which together contributes 65-95% of the company’s carbon emissions. So, if scope 3 emissions are excluded from carbon accounting, the majority of their emissions remain unreported.
Companies that report on their scope 3 emissions stand out from their competitors who lag behind in their disclosure, and can identify and act upon areas for improvement within their supply chain. Leaders in reporting and acting on scope 3 emissions are also better equipped to manage existing and potential regulations.
The demand is growing more urgent for disclosure of scope 3 emissions tied to energy storage systems. For batteries, this disclosure includes data on their GHG, energy, water, and volatile organic compound footprints. Fortunately, up-to-date research now helps users make quantitative comparisons across battery chemistries. In energy-heavy industries such as data centers, where facilities race to showcase their sustainability, this offers a key opportunity to stand out by reducing scope 3 emissions through battery choices.
Energy storage has clearly established its role in the clean energy transition, and the importance of sustainability as a whole is hardly news. But the increase in attention to the environmental footprint of these energy storage technologies is fascinating. Companies and municipalities are no longer able to rely on surface level decisions as they set and meet their climate targets. As the role of storage in decarbonization strategies grows, so does the importance of choosing the most sustainable batteries.
Alternative Battery Chemistries Challenge Incumbents
Another reason why battery sustainability has become such a hot topic is the increasing number of different battery options. Gone are the days where a single battery chemistry could consider their foothold on an industry secure. Now, both established and new companies fiercely compete to capitalize on alternative battery technologies’ advantages over the incumbents.
For instance, many data centers once considered lead-acid batteries the standard for meeting their uninterruptible power supply (UPS) needs. Then, lithium-ion batteries’ market entrance triggered a migration as data center operators realized the advantages of lithium’s longer life and lower maintenance needs. Following this disruption, the market became more open to additional chemistries, such as nickel-zinc (NiZn), that provide even more advantages – for example, greater safety, more reliability, and a higher power density that delivers a smaller footprint in a real-estate focused industry.
Of course, change isn’t quick, and many of these alternative chemistries have existed for decades. Incumbent technologies have the advantage of existing infrastructure built with these batteries in mind. Even if a company were to consider swapping out a lead-acid battery for lithium-ion, they would have to address not only the batteries themselves but also the connected systems, which may not be compatible with the replacements.
Fortunately, technological advancements address this obstacle by enabling drop-in replacements for incumbents. UPS solutions include advanced battery cabinets that offer backwards and forwards compatibility with existing UPS infrastructure. With this barrier to battery replacement removed, more data centers can adopt alternative battery chemistries without overhauling their backup power infrastructure.
Alternative battery chemistries are challenging incumbents on a variety of characteristics: safety, sustainability, cost, abuse tolerance, space requirements, and more. As new technologies are tailored to excel in these areas, the energy storage industry grows increasingly competitive – making the customer the ultimate winner.
A Hybrid Approach: Microgrids are Increasingly Incorporating Multiple Battery Chemistries
With the commercialization of alternative batteries, markets are realizing that no single battery chemistry exists that is perfect for every use case. As the concept of a “one size fits all” energy storage solution is retired, organizations can creatively incorporate multiple batteries to best meet their needs. Developers have begun to diversify the types of batteries being used in their operations, taking advantage of each chemistry’s unique strengths.
A key distinguishing factor between different batteries is whether they offer high power density or energy density. If a battery has a high power density, it can release large amounts of energy for a short period of time (also known as a high discharge rate). In contrast, a battery with high energy density may have a moderate to low discharge rate, but can supply this amount of energy for a prolonged period of time.
These separate battery types, with differing power and energy densities, can be used together for the same application in a complementary hybrid approach. Microgrids are being developed that have the option of pulling power from a power battery or energy battery, depending on the circumstance. Such an approach is particularly useful for peak power shaving and EV charging systems.
Peak power shaving is the use of battery storage to supply power to a microgrid when power demand and its ensuing costs are highest. This strategy helps operations save money while maintaining disruption-free microgrid functionality. As the transportation economy electrifies, it increases power supply stress on the grid, which in turn increases the grid’s reliance on battery energy storage. While high energy-density batteries (such as lithium-ion) are well adapted to support long duration power demand, they often are not powerful enough to meet short-term peak power demand. At these times, high-power density batteries like NiZn can respond on demand to support those types of short-term microgrid power requirements.
Another example is the power battery use case for EV charging in environments with fluctuating demand. Most battery-powered EV charging stations can support simultaneous demand for only a few level 2 charge sessions, which are slower than level 3. The increase in demand for high power level 3 charging, and simultaneous level 3 charging of multiple EVs, is driving the need for high power batteries. By incorporating multiple battery chemistry options into a single charging station, the system can adjust between providing longer duration, lower power charging or faster, higher power charging based on the needs of the situation.
The varying demands of an electrified economy now require operations to be smart about the batteries they utilize, identifying the best resources based on specific situations. These hybrid approaches show how different battery chemistries don’t always have to compete; instead, they can complement each other and provide a more effective solution.
The Future of Energy Storage
These interconnected trends will intensify. The desire for more sustainable batteries has helped spark the exploration of new chemistries that allow developers and users to take hybrid approaches for their operations. These trends stand true across multiple industries as energy storage use becomes even more widespread. As new technologies emerge and compete, these trends can be expected to bolster the sustainability, efficiency, and value of the energy storage industry.
This post originally appeared in PV Magazine.
Nickel-Zinc Introduction
This webinar introduces ZincFive’s Nickel-Zinc battery chemistry. The Webinar will cover what makes ZincFive unique and discuss the reliable, safe, powerful, and green advantages of Nickel-Zinc over Lithium and Lead-Acid batteries.
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30 minutes with Q/A
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