Chinese multinational technology company Tencent has officially launched a renewable-powered hybrid microgrid project at a data center in Huailai County, Hebei Province, China.

The project has a total installed capacity of 10.99MW and an annual generation capacity of 14 million kWh.

The project will use onsite wind power, solar PV, and battery energy storage (BESS) in a microgrid solution to power an adjacent data center.

According to the company, it is China's first fully integrated microgrid project that deploys wind, solar, and BESS.

The company, which says it will become carbon neutral by 2030, claims renewable energy accounts for 54 percent of annual electricity consumption in its data centers, with more than 70 percent of its self-built campuses using green power.

Tencent has already deployed microgrid solutions at its data centers. In January, it officially launched a microgrid project at Tencent Tianjin High-Tech Cloud Data Center in China.

The project has a total installed capacity of 10.54MW of solar, producing 12 million kWh of electricity annually. The company has developed a three-pronged approach to deal with fluctuations in energy supply at the data center.

Firstly, it has introduced filtering and suppression techniques at the Tianjin data center to make solar power more consistent and usable. It has installed equipment to store excess energy so that it can be used to provide backup power or in times of low supply and is using an AI system to manage its facility's energy demands.

Data center firms are increasingly exploring microgrid solutions to power their operations. Bloom Energy is at the forefront of this drive, signing several supply deals for its fuel cell solution. Earlier this month, it inked a supply agreement with American Electric Power for up to 1GW of its solid oxide fuel cells.

Before this, in July, it inked a 15-year 20MW offtake agreement to supply AWS with fuel cells for a planned data center in Silicon Valley.