CenturyLink, the parent company of data center services provider Savvis, announced Monday a plan to install fuel cells that convert natural gas into electricity at the site of its Irvine, California, data center.

Fuel cells are a fairly new technology for the data center industry, but a number of high-profile data center operators, including eBay, Apple, AT&T and NTT, have given it their blessings by deploying fuel-cell installations to supplement – and in eBay's case replace – power they draw from the electrical grid.

CenturyLink's fuel cells, manufactured by Bloom Energy, will generate up to 500kW of power for the facility. The company expects the plant to produce about 4.4m kWh of electricity a year for the data center used to provide Savvis' colocation, managed hosting and cloud services.

David Meredith, senior VP and global general manager at Savvis, said exploration of alternative energy sources was a must to support growing demand for network and IT infrastructure. “Bloom's clean fuel cells offer a way for businesses like CenturyLink to promote the continuing evolution of technology without sacrificing their sustainability commitments.”

While natural gas is not generally considered a renewable energy source, the fuel is much cleaner than coal. The discovery over the past several years of massive resources of shale gas in the US and the proliferation of shale-gas extraction technique referred to as “fracking” have pushed gas prices to historic lows, making products like Bloom's an increasingly attractive alternative to grid power.

Last week, eBay announced the launch of its latest data center in Salt Lake City, Utah, which gets all of its electricity from a Bloom fuel-cell installation on site, the power grid acting as backup. Dean Nelson, who is in charge of all of eBay's data center infrastructure, told us this was a cheaper option than buying grid power in that particular location.

Using the grid as backup, eBay also saved tremendously by not having to install the traditional backup power infrastructure, such as uniterruptible power supplies, battery banks and diesel generators.

The Savvis data center in Irvine will also use fuel cells as its primary energy source, the company said. The installation is expected to come online by mid-2014.