Edge data centres

Practical example and current challenges

• Considering global warming, the Member States of the European Union have agreed on and committed themselves to common climate protection objectives. The aim is to limit the negative effects of climate change. One measure also includes increasing the share of energy from renewable sources.
• At the same time, the reform of the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) poses great challenges for many operators of green energy production plants and has an impact on their business situation. In particular, plants whose subsidies are expiring are searching for new sources of income that will enable them to continue operating and stabilize the electricity price from the point of view of the producers.
• At the same time, digitization is advancing rapidly, with the result that computing power is needed everywhere to implement digital applications and is already offered as a product in the cloud.
• Given this situation, the idea was born to combine the two topics and to couple the sectors: The Use Case describes the use of energy from the above mentioned systems to generate computing power and thus generate a second contribution margin for the operators. This ensures the continued operation of the plants. At the same time, the operators of data centres benefit from comparatively low electricity prices.
• Just like electricity, computing power can be sold to customers via an infrastructure. However, both products can only be distributed via an efficient infrastructure.

What added value does the "GAIA-X project" offer?

• GAIA-X enables the networking of more than 50,000 energy production plants distributed across Germany to create a green-powered digital infrastructure (solar parks, wind farms, biogas plants, hydroelectric power plants).
• GAIA-X can expand rapidly with the nodes in energy production plants and, via the GAIA-X system technology to be developed, can offer digital services to all citizens of the European Union.
• The operators of production plants will also become the operators of the GAIA-X nodes in personal identity. They will thus finance the GAIA-X system hardware.
• The GAIA-X Consortium is free to determine the design and use of the GAIA-X nodes for a fee to the operators.
• Sites, permits, infrastructure, energy and capital can be provided by the operators of plants.
• GAIA-X receives 100% of the computing power for use and marketing.
• Digitization and climate protection are merging together.
• The transformation of energy systems is promoted by giving operators of production plants a second contribution margin, which allows them to continue operating their plants and build new ones. Electricity can be made available to all electricity customers at a lower cost.

Use Case Team

• Tobias Mader – ExaMesh GmbH