Rolls supplying power plants for Romanian data center campus

Romanian cloud service provider ClusterPower is planning a US$43 million data center campus near the southern city of Craiova that will be powered by mtu power plants.

The 273 000 sq. m campus will scale to a power output of 200 MW, once all five data centers being planned come on stream in 2025, said ClusterPower.

Rolls-Royce and its distributor partner Knopf & Wallisch (K&W) supplied three mtu customized and containerized combined cooling, heat and power plant (CCHP) trigeneration units.

The generator sets are based on mtu 20V 4000 L64 FNER gas engines which are designed for quick ramp-up and ramp-down and offer a wide-range of load operations. The gensets are hydrogen-ready, offering the ability to blend 25% hydrogen along with natural gas and can be transformed into a pure hydrogen engine in the future

The first of the five data centers will open its doors in the first quarter of 2022. The mtu CCHP units supply electricity, heat and cooling for the building and the infrastructure. The concept to use the gas gensets as prime power producing electricity while using the main grid as backup is a unique configuration that is currently rarely seen. Guided by ClusterPower’s requests, K&W developed a highly efficient solution to capture most of the exhaust heat from the system with conversion chillers and transform it into chilled air to cool the data center facilities.

“I think that Romania has a lot to say about the European future of innovation and digitalization and we have the opportunity here to develop new infrastructures, using the latest technologies and with modern environmental standards,” said Georgescu. “We are lucky enough to start fresh and we will put this opportunity to good use. It is always nice to know that we have partners ready to support us in our endeavors.”