I thought this was a fun little piece about a putative race for "black gold" between Apple and Google. Although I will admit that there's one part that really puzzled me. The black gold though, no, it's not oil: rather, it's pig....manure I suppose we'd better call it.
The argument is around the electricity for data centres. Both Apple and Google have one in North Carolina, both of them are using or thinking of using solid oxide fuel cells to at least partially power them. I think I'm right in saying that they're using equipment from the same supplier as well: Bloom Energy. I know the Apple cell is and Google has certainly used Bloom in the past elsewhere.
The black gold that they may or may not be fighting over is the plentiful pig...manure in the state. From which you can make biogas (methane) which can be used to power those fuel cells. It's not a no carbon method but it is a low carbon one. The fight being mooted is over whether there's enough manure in the state to power both data centres. To which the answer is yes, no problem at all, leaving us to conclude that the "race" and "fight" is just the original journalist getting a little over excited.
However, here's the part that really puzzled me:
So why is the country’s biggest fuel cell complex in North Carolina and not California? First of all, the electrical system as a whole is very reliable in North Carolina and costs to industrial customers are about 30% lower than the national average.
That doesn't make sense.
It makes sense that the data centres are where power is cheap and reliable. But fuel cells are still more expensive* than grid electricity. So having cheap electricity should mean that a place is less likely, not more, to get a fuel cell powered system. And they don't make this logical error once, but twice:
Extrapolating from North Carolina, perhaps other states with an abundance of energy-producing manure and lower-than-average energy costs (like Iowa) can expect to see interest from other tech giants and their fuel cells.
Again, I don't understand. If you've got lower than average energy costs then you're less likely to use manure: because it's more expensive.
* A very minor part of this is my fault, sorry. Bloom's fuel cells use scandium (although I do not supply them) and prices have soared recently. Partly because it has taken me longer than I thought it would to open up a new supply. Sorry, mea culpa etc.
