Get Some Answers at The Appalachian Hydrogen & Carbon Capture Conference VI

PENN VALLEY, PA, UNITED STATES, October 22, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Locating and powering AI Data Centers is an important new engineering challenge. Mike Broeker likens the energy industry now with what was happening in the energy industry in the 2008-2009 period: a time of massive transition.

Back then, “Marcellus Shale” was a proverbial land grab, with natural gas E&Ps stumbling over themselves amassing mineral rights on huge tracts of land to tap the “Marcellus Wave.”

Today, the transition is to green: renewables such as wind, solar, biomass and the Holy Grail of Hydrogen, with natural gas serving at least as the transition fuel to H2 for years, if not decades.

And don’t forget nuclear, Broeker says, as Small Modular Reactors lead the way to a nuclear resurgence.

“We believe in a behind-the-meter solution stack (of various power generation sources),” said Broeker, Managing Director of energy advisory/private capital firm Bedford Management Partners. “This is a new important area of private capital investment in data centers, including Bedford’s $500M first tranche available for these types of behind-the-meter power solutions”.

Broeker will be a featured speaker at Appalachian Hydrogen & Carbon Capture VI, slated for Nov. 7, at the Hilton Garden Inn Pittsburgh/Southpointe, south of Pittsburgh. The conference was developed by the H2-CCS Network and Shale Directories.

Broeker has seen transitions; he has three decades of senior leadership in technology, energy and water investments, through private capital and single-family offices.

Behind the meter means not relying on the nation’s power grid to power a factory or a data center. With the retirement-closing of numerous coal-fired power plants, the overall baseload power (full-time, always running) available via the grid has been greatly reduced.

“You don’t have the baseload reserves you once had with so many coal plants no longer producing power,” according to Broeker. “Data center companies are now building on-site power generation solutions. The grid cannot provide all of the baseload power data centers now need to grow AI.”

Data centers are huge power users, with needs as high as 1-2GW for hyperscale centers,” Broeker said. Such huge needs at a single site can be engineered, but it is not without numerous problems.

That is why the integrated power stack is the solution, according to Broeker. We are starting to design and build these large integrated power stacks.

“Nuclear power is still 10 years out, and competitively priced Hydrogen is between 3 and 6 years away,” he said. “What we need more of is intelligent, integrated power generation design and usage.”

Joe Barone
Shale Directories
+1 610-764-1232
jbarone@shaledirectories.com

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