Nissan has made a big environmental push recently, turning to renewable energy at its Sunderland plant and investigating ways to repurpose used EV batteries. The automotive giant has now teamed up with power management company Eaton on an energy storage system for Webaxys, giving Leaf batteries a new life supplying power to data centers.
According to Nissan, between 1.5 and 2 percent of the world's electricity is consumed by data centers. That's a percentage that rises every year, too. Unfortunately, it's not easy to run a stable data center on renewable energy, because they're incredibly sensitive to outages.
The new Nissan system will act as an energy storage system for renewable energy, opening the door for its wider adoption, both at the new Webaxys data center in Saint-Romain de Colbosc Eco Park in Normandy and beyond.
"This installation at Webaxys marks an important historical moment for data centers in their quest to become energy autonomous in the near future," says Gareth Dunsmore, director of electric vehicles at Nissan Europe. "By combining Nissan's expertize in vehicle design and reliable battery technology with Eaton's leadership in power quality and electronics, we hope to demonstrate that data centre energy management can be stable, sustainable and cost efficient in the near future."
Source: Nissan