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Comment by juujian | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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