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Seems to be shrugging this 'war' off.

PLUG just announced that it is selling the site for its proposed 120MW green hydrogen plant in New York state.

The buyer? Stream Data Centres.

Percy

That has already been happening in the USA. Essentially, local authorities are stopping planning approvals for very large data centres. There are three main reasons.

1) Inadequate local water supplies

2) Inadequate local power supply

3) Local voter resistance due to the increasing cost of domestic electricity supply (driven by 2 above).

The UK issue will be about both 1. inadequate power supply and 2. the high unit cost of electricity in the UK. I saw a report in a UK newspaper last week that the price in France is HALF of what we pay. Not hard to figure out where the big data centres will be built.

Hy2020 great find. Excellent news indeed.

Some additional information

A New Civil Engineer magazine article on the LTC contract notes that Geopura already have 6 hydrogen generators working on-site in Essex. As I noted in a previous post, AFC was in no way ready to bid for this contract.

In major procurement tendering, proven operational experience always trumps aspirations and best intentions.

Some additional information

A New Civil Engineer magazine article on the LTC contract notes that Geopura already have 6 hydrogen generators working on-site in Essex. As I noted in a previusl

An alternative view

1) This is NOT a lost opportunity for AFC.

Why - because AFC does not yet have the equipment and supply chain required to deliver the Lower Thames contract.

A contract you cannot deliver on is not an opportunity. However, it is an example of what is possible in the future as AFC scales up.

2) AFC has not been 'out-competed'.

Why - because it did not compete for this contract, per reasons above. Safe to assume that Lower Thames would not , yet, see AFC as a credible supplier for a project of this scale.

The critical competitive 'fact' that we do not have is how much Geopura is being paid for this service (£ per kg of H2). We therefore have no idea how that would compare with the £10/kg quoted by AFC management. We do know they are using UK (highly) priced electricity in their electrolyser and (highly) priced 300Bar tube trailers to move the gas from Nottinghamshire to their customers' sites.

We have a lot more work to do before we are ready to jump the very small number of fences at the Lower Thames scale. We will, however, soon be able to demonstrate a fleet delivering power across a range of construction sites at a market-disrupting fuel price.

There are a great many customers who want and will pay for that.

Hydo-jen

A great many complex pieces of kit are designed to run continuously, particularly when the start-up (or shutdown) processes stress the equipment, e.g., significant temperature differences between 'off' and 'on'. That often takes a long time to step the kit up from standstill to full operation.

Iron -making blast furnaces run continuously for up to 20 years before they are shut for re-lining. Oil refineries, glass factories, ceramics making, etc., run continuously, usually stopping only once a year for the whole-system annual maintenance.

Ceres electrolysers are designed to operate continuously, because they run at 650 degrees centigrade. PEM electrolysers compete with Alkaline because Alkaline take 30 minutes to start up. PEM can respond to load changes within 2-3 seconds; hence, they are well suited to handling variations in wind power supply to the electrolyser.

Nojhead, I agree. AFC has already made a public statement about the launch price. Having done that, AFC's commercial (and technical) credibility is now on the line. £10/kg it will be.

To your point on market 'disruption'. Offering a product 20% cheaper is not a disruption; £10/kg is.

AFC is not currently a market leader in H2 supply. We are late, and Geopura is making hay big time. We now have to displace them, and the cracker/fuel cell combination is the technological 'disruption' to do that at a commercially 'disruptive' price.

I have read some comments here about 'transport costs for moving ammonia'. Fair point, but in his presentation, Mr Wilson showed a slide where one standard trailer of ammonia has the energy equivalent of 20 H2 tube trailers. In addition, the ammonia trailers are an order of magnitude cheaper to buy because they operate at a much lower pressure. Hence, the economic competitiveness of the fuelling process is significantly in AFC's favour.

I would bet that Geopura are looking at us with serious concern about being on the wrong end of a significant market 'disruption'.

Bilbo - That is what I thought too. A very interesting approach to take in shorting ITM. Well i guess their machine will have time to reflect on that later.

I also hold Ceres, where Voleon opened a short late in January. Looking into them, I found Voleon is not a ’normal’ shorter. They are a machine-learning-based hedge fund. This paragraph is from Wikipedia. Read the last sentence twice.

The firm engages in statistical arbitrage by going through data to find trading signals and patterns related to securities. A machine learning approach is used where computers are trained to operate independently with no human supervision to write algorithms that make predictions for trades. The founders have stated these algorithms are like black boxes, and they do not know how they work internally. An example of machine learning involves the analysis of terabytes of data on every price change of every stock in 15 years. While other peers also use machine learning, Voleon focuses solely on it when performing trades.

Make of that what you will. I wonder what has their machine has learned to do when ITM gets a 50MW order?

I use Investing.com Watchlists to track my portfolio. It has a feature which show past performance. For AFC the numbers are now largely green:

Day +0.65%

Week +13.27%

Month +0.48%

YTD +22.16%

1 Year +36.47%

3 Year -51.33%

I also have Rolls Royce with a 3 year increase is +1034.83%.

Pretty amazing what a highly competent executive team can do with a previously under-performing business.

Alpha

In the USA, and many other countries, the fuel cells in Data Centre applications will burn natural gas, not hydrogen.

The UK now has some of the most expensive electricity in the world. It makes no economic sense to use that electricity to produce hydrogen and then convert it back into electricity.

The price of electricity in the UK is now a major disincentive for hyperscalers to build data centres here, as well as for other energy-intensive production processes.

Alpha

We will find out in the near future, as construction starts in the next few months.

Breakofdawn

The planning application documents for the Kimberley Clark project we won recently, included Cummins electrolyser drawings. That suggests that ITM kit is comparable in terms of physical scale and readily connectable to the on-site service imputs/outputs.

I will be interesting to see if that advatage helps persuade Grenian towards ITM as replacement electrolysers.

In our case - knitted in Sheffield - and sold wherever there is a PEM application customer.

Looking for salvage in the wreckage of Cummins (or maybe PLUG) is a distraction. Distractions are both a waste of time and a misuse of strategic energy.

As I noted earlier today, there are contracts now contracts going without a preferred supplier. I am sure Dennis will be focused on them. And that is exactly where his attention should be.

Another notable statistic from Bloom was their order backlog.

$6bn; and mostly for the USA.

There are five HAR2 projects in the North West of England proposed by Grenian Hydrogen. Grenian is. Cummins partner, now without a partner.

The projects are mainly targeted at direct supply to industrial processes eg Tata Chemicals and Pilkington Glass.

One might think Hydropulse could be an appropriate alternative.

The PLUG proposal to allow them to double the number of shares from 1.5 to 3 billion has been rejected.

Oh dear . . . .

Why is SOFC so important for the US data centre market?

Read the article below, written by a US-based tech analyst, is about Bloom and SOFC. It is an extremely interesting analysis of the issue and why SOFC has a huge opportunity.

It also includes extensive data on market scale and why 'off-grid' solutions from SOFC are essential for hyperscalers.

It is also a screaming recommendation for a Ceres licensee in the USA

hTtps://seekingalpha.com/article/4862022-bloom-energy-solving-the-ai-data-center-power-bottleneck#scroll_comments