The AI race has put the electrical infrastructures of half the world in check. Data centers need more and more megawatts, and they need them now. But the energy industry does not play at the same pace, which explains why there are companies installing airplane engines next to these huge graphics card farms.
Two options, two problems. When a company builds a new data center for AI, it has two options. The first is to connect to the electrical network, but according to IEEE Spectrumpermits to carry out interconnection can reach eight or even ten years in some regions. AI, however, advances in a matter of months, and cannot wait a decade.
Hence, many companies, like Elon Musk’s xAIopt for option 2: build their own power plant on the site. This is not without problems either. Global demand for gas turbines has skyrocketed, and not just because of AI, but because of economic growth in Asia and the Middle East.
Manufacturers such as GE Vernova or Siemens Energy have waiting lists of three to five years, and for larger models, the period is longer. As noted in a report by Public Powera new gas plant project commissioned today could begin operating in 2032.
Aircraft engines as power plants. This bottleneck has caused, on the one hand, that turbine manufacturers rub their handsand on the other, that companies sharpen their ingenuity. And this is where aeronautical engineering and the reuse of aircraft turbines come into play.
The concept of using aircraft engines to generate electricity is not new. They are known as aeroderivative turbines: they are smaller, lighter and easier to maintain than heavy industrial turbines. What is new is the scale and urgency with which this solution is being implemented.
From a Boeing 747 to the data center. An American company called ProEnergy has become a protagonist of the trend with a simple plan: buy used jet engine cores, specifically the CF6-80C2 model of the iconic Boeing 747, and adapt them. These engines, after decades of service in the air, are disassembled, reviewed piece by piece and rebuilt for a second life on dry land.
The result is the PE6000 unit, a gas turbine that, as detailed the popia companyis capable of generating 48 megawatts (MW) of electricity. A single one of these units can power a small or medium-sized data center, or a city of up to 40,000 homes.
A bridging solution. The reality is that these converted aircraft engines are not the definitive solution, but rather what the industry bridges for the first years of operation of its data centers. “Both projects are designed to provide bridge power for five to seven years, which is when they hope to have interconnection to the grid,” says the CEO of ProEnergy.
But business is good. The company has already sold 21 of these turbines for two projects, adding more than 1 gigawatt (GW) of capacity thanks to its speed of delivery. Companies can buy a turbine from ProEnergy by 2027 or wait a decade to build a conventional plant. Everyone wins. Except the environment. It is gas that ends up burning in order to have these data centers operational in record time.
Image | ProEnergy
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