Introducing the Aston Clean Energy Campus
The Aston Clean Energy Campus is a revolutionary way to build and power new industrial projects like data centers using carbon free electricity.
The data center boom, spurred on by new technologies like AI and crypto, has created an unprecedented surge in the global demand for electricity.
What if we could meet this demand not with fossil fuels, but with new clean energy campuses built specifically for industrial needs? Better yet, what if these clean energy campuses could be built almost immediately, instead of waiting years to connect to the outdated power grid?
This would enable businesses to rapidly bring new data centers and other energy-intensive industrial projects online while removing fossil fuels from the supply chain—a win for both business and the environment.
That’s exactly the idea behind the Aston Clean Energy Campus.
What is the Aston Clean Energy Campus?
The Aston Clean Energy Campus is a revolutionary demand-driven way to build and power new industrial projects using carbon free electricity.
Using a robust network of partners and Aston’s proprietary software platform, we help businesses design and build new industrial projects (data centers, cold storage, warehouses and much more) powered directly by on-site clean energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal
Each campus is self contained, meaning it can operate fully without relying on either connection or changes to the existing power grid.
What types of clean energy does the Aston Clean Energy Campus support?
Each Aston Clean Energy Campus can support up to five types of carbon-free power generation and storage:
- Wind
- Solar
- Geothermal
- Small modular reactors
- Short & long duration storage
Depending on constraints like the availability of natural resources in a particular area as well as the budget and uptime requirements of a particular business, these options can be mixed and matched to meet an organization’s precise business needs.
What types of industrial needs are best suited for the Aston Clean Energy Campus?
Based on the costs of both clean energy and reliable power service, the Aston team has identified five major demand profiles best suited to operate on a Clean Energy Campus. These are:
- Data centers
- Cold storage
- EV Charging
- Dry warehouses
- Green chemical production
Each of these demand profiles has an acceptable tolerance for uptime variability. This means they can be fully powered and operational using a precise combination of the power generation and storage options listed above, without relying on generators or connection to the grid.
What are the benefits of the Aston Clean Energy Campus?
The Aston Clean Energy Campus offers a number of important benefits, both for businesses and for global decarbonization efforts.
- By focusing on individual industrial applications instead of serving as a broad public utility, each campus can bypass the need to connect to the outdated power grid and avoid the well-documented challenges that come along with updating it.
- Bypassing the need to connect to or upgrade the grid means businesses can dramatically reduce the time it takes to bring new clean energy projects online, going from ideation to construction in months, not years.
- Finally, by precisely matching on-site energy generation with immediate demand, the Aston Clean Energy Campus is able to bridge a key gap in the transition to a carbon-free future—namely, turning clean power generation into clean power service.
This is what makes the Aston Clean Energy Campus so unique. It combines an industrial site powered by on-site, demand-driven, carbon-free energy with a network of experienced construction and funding partners and proprietary software platform.
The end result is a uniquely scalable, one-stop solution that allows for the rapid expansion of clean energy campuses both across the US and around the world.
