HPC Wire reports that Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is teaming up with the National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) to create a hydrogen powered data center that will be extremely reliable and energy efficient. This will allow researchers and high performance computing users to reach a more sustainable level of computing power.

The average cost of a data center outage has increased from $505,502 in 2010 to $740,357 in 2016, at 38% increase. 91% of data centers in the United States have reported experiencing unplanned outages in the past year. As the global data center power market increases to a projected $29 billion by 2020, these centers will consume 140 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually and will cost US companies an estimated $13 billion in annual electricity bills. As such, energy efficiency is critical.

Not only does computing require vast amounts of energy, it also creates tremendous amounts of heat, excessive carbon emissions, and harmful waste. HPE is working to reduce this carbon footprint. Fuel cells convert chemical energy into electrical energy in a process that produces much fewer carbon emissions than traditional technology. This allows facilities to generate their own on-site power, and eliminates the need to transport energy over long distances.

The NREL along with HPE, Intel, Daimler, and Power Innovations are working on a proof-of-concept demonstration that uses a hydrogen fuel cell to provide power to the lab’s data center. The 65 kilowatt automotive hydrogen fuel cell is fed by NREL’s renewably produced hydrogen.