Japan to test datacenter powered by reused hydrogen fuel cells | Hacker News Reader

Japan to test datacenter powered by reused hydrogen fuel cells

theregister.com

29 pointsgslin11 comments

What's the point in bypassing the grid with this project? Can they produce electricity at a lower price? Or just to get carbon credits or sth equally silly?

> The project is scheduled to run for two years from March 31 in Shunan City, Japan. It aims to assess any reduction in carbon dioxide emissions from datacenter ops

I assume the datacenter has been powered by the grid so far though? Or did it have its own generators? What's the advantage of colocating the fuels cells and the datacenter? We already know fuel cells produce electricity and we know that datacenters run on electricity. From all I can tell this is just some kind of marketing ploy and nothing novel whatsoever.

This is a project to investigate operating a datacenter off of industrial byproduct waste, using hydrogen run off as a stand-in for fuel cell refuse.

>Honda and Mitsubishi are to test the feasibility of powering a datacenter with fuel cells taken from electric vehicles, using hydrogen produced as a byproduct of an industrial process.

>Hydrogen for the fuel cell power station will be provided by a third Japanese company, Tokuyama Corporation, as a byproduct from its salt water electrolysis business, which manufactures about 50,000 tons of sodium hypochlorite each year.

>It is likely that the process Tokuyama uses in its salt water electrolysis is ultimately powered by fossil fuels, but the hydrogen is produced as a byproduct and this is currently just a demonstration project to evaluate the feasibility of integrated hydrogen business models.

This is a surprising and interesting. This is an actual supply of hydrogen that wasn't based on using fossil fuels or cracking water. Since they are reused fuel cells, they don't have that incredible expensive fuel cell bill of materials. Apparently the fuel cells in the toyota mirai are really expensive because of materials needed. Thanks for posting that.

Up to now all the h car projects just seemed like an attempt to keep the industrial complex useful, transferring the ideas of ICE. There's a kind of structural challenge to the ICE industrial complex with EVs because their expertise in design, building, service gas engines will not be needed with EVs. But this, this is promising to even me.

There is value in actually doing things in the real world. Because purely desk-driven calculations tend to hand-wave away things that are surprisingly hard in the real world.

So yeah...

Probably just public relations.

The public hyper focuses blame for carbon emissions on huge electricity consumers (e.g. datacenters, manufacturing, bitcoin miners, etc) rather than on electricity producers who actually physically emit the carbon and is the obvious place to put pressure on in the form of carbon tax and incentives for renewables, storage, and carbon capture.

Datacenters in particular have acquired a bad reputation in the public eye as dirty and bad for the planet for some reason. This isn't even a new trend. People were pearl clutching about PCs using too much energy back in the 90s. https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1999/0531/6311070a.html?sh=6af...

Maybe it's because the utility of datacenters is a couple of orders removed from direct public benefit, unlike industries like chemical manufacturing, which is an order of magnitude more energy intensive but doesn't get the same public scrutiny. Maybe it's just because IT is the new kid on the block and easier for establishment political power to scapegoat.

> Probably just public relations.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/18/700877189/japan-is-betting-bi...

https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...

https://ieefa.org/resources/japans-bet-hydrogen-still-unwave...

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There's a general attempt to make a hydrogen economy on Japan... which might work given the island... but also might fail, given that it's an island and thus low demand outside of Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_syndrome

For one, robustness. Grid power may not be available due to environmental disaster (particularly relevant in Japan), targeted attacks or any other outage, so it's functionally the greener equivalent of any traditional backup power source.

Is this another PR article for Toyota that keeps hanging onto the idea of using hydrogen cells for everything?

First three words of the article: “Honda and Mitsubishi”.

> Is this another PR article for Toyota that keeps hanging onto the idea of using hydrogen cells for everything?

I dunno man. You tell us.

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