Sabey Data Centers announced on 30 October that it is testing hydrotreated vegetable oil, known as HVO, as the main fuel for the backup generators at its Austin, Texas campus. The U.S. developer and operator wants to find out whether this renewable diesel can reduce the environmental impact of its standby plant without costing anything in reliability, and whether the same step would work at its other sites.
What the announcement says, and what it leaves out
Sabey describes HVO as a fuel made by hydrotreating vegetable oils and waste fats, used cooking oil included, and says it can be burned in existing diesel generators without engine modifications. The reason for starting with the generators is that they are a hard-to-reduce source of direct emissions for a data center operator.
The company points to a 2022 study by Argonne National Laboratory, according to which renewable diesel from waste-based feedstocks cuts lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions by 79 to 86 percent compared with petroleum diesel, while crop-based feedstocks cut them by 40 to 69 percent. Sabey says it will keep track of what the HVO it burns is made from, since the origin decides how much of that benefit is real.
The release gives no number of generators, no fuel volumes, no length of the pilot, no fuel supplier and no engine make. If the results support it, the company intends to extend testing to further sites where fuel availability and operating conditions allow.
The tank matters more than the label on the fuel
Switching a standby plant to HVO is mostly a fuel-handling question. A backup set may burn very little in a year, so the fuel can sit for a long time, and the checks on quality, the polishing routine and the layout of the tank decide whether the first call-out goes smoothly. Supply is the other half: someone has to deliver HVO with paperwork that shows the feedstock, in quantities that suit a site that rarely draws it down.
It is the same direction we reported from England, where the council approved the Iver data center with HVO as the first fuel and diesel as the fallback. The Texas pilot is smaller and still without figures, but operators seem to prefer proving the fuel on one campus rather than arguing about it later in front of a permit board.
For anyone specifying tanks or fuel systems for HVO, the first thing to ask the operator is the expected annual consumption, because that decides how long the fuel stays in the tank.
Sources: PR Newswire