Re: Why, oh why ?
You buy 3 years worth of supply. In Canada, Bulk Propane prices are about 38 cents per litre which is quite a bit more than our local 12 cents per kilowatt hour electricity rates BUT the owners wanted TRUE off-grid performance so they went with propane-based fuel cell technology.
You buy in bulk once each tank gets drawn down to about 25% of actual pressurization at about 150 PSI and buy enough to get back up to 600 PSI. If all tanks are full its about three years of supply.
Propane has a pressurization limit of about 600 PSI where gas volume does not DECREASE easily upon greater pressurization....SOOOOOOOO.... we buy about every two to three years depending upon the fuel cell update cycle which is dependent upon the TYPES of calculations done. We are talking about multiple tanks 4 metres in inner diameter and 30 meters in length with wall thicknesses over 20 cm+ of high strength pressure vessel-grades of steel (there's a calculation you need to do for 600 PSI gasses in terms of wall thickness) That is STILL waaaaaay over 25 million litres of propane that needs to be bought at a time!
We are getting to the fuel cell membrane proton exchange limits by 2022 AND because of a 3:1 performance increase over the earlier 2005-era models of fuel cell, we will be exchanging ALL the fuel cell out over this year and next with brand new ones, which means our gas supply will last even longer!
For safety purposes, you create blowout tunnels for the underground tank which direct any explosive breaches of a tank to the outside air so it doesn't create a giant bomb. The funnel shaped tunnels create a rapid expansion of gas that makes a nice outward directed fireball not overly a damaging rock-cracking explosive energy burst if ever there was a MAJOR gas breach.
GaAs chips do require more electricity because line traces are 280nm wide needing more power at higher frequencies (Clock speed is 60 GHz) vs CMOS chip technology BUT our calculations are so high-speed that actual compute time for specific applications is much faster so in aggregate, we would run about the same amount of overall power usage as CMOS per job BUT we STILL use much more power in total than CMOS because we run 24/7/365 doing more work per year!
This is NOT a cheap facility to run BUT when you are earning NET about $150 million USD per QUARTER ($600 million per year) worth of financial instruments trading, it makes sense to build and run such a facility on a purely financial basis.
One owner has a 100+ metre super-yacht and the others own major tall buildings in New York, Toronto, Berlin, London, LA and Vancouver so I think they can EASILY AFFORD to run the place!
These are MAJOR finance people with money to spare!
V
Biting the hand that feeds IT
