CPH2 reaches ‘pivotal milestone’ on Northern Ireland green hydrogen project

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CPH2 reaches ‘pivotal milestone’ on Northern Ireland green hydrogen project

Clean Power Hydrogen (CPH2) has announced the completion of the third and final site acceptance test at its green hydrogen electrolyser project in Northern Ireland. CPH2 said the development is a “pivotal milestone” for the company in commercialising its membrane-free electrolyser (MFE) technology. The 500 kW MFE110 electrolyser produced high purity hydrogen and oxygen in […]

Clean Power Hydrogen (CPH2) has announced the completion of the third and final site acceptance test at its green hydrogen electrolyser project in Northern Ireland.

CPH2 said the development is a “pivotal milestone” for the company in commercialising its membrane-free electrolyser (MFE) technology.

The 500 kW MFE110 electrolyser produced high purity hydrogen and oxygen in a commercial environment for the first time, CPH2 said.

The project is located at Northern Ireland Water’s (NIW) site in Belfast, with the final tests witnessed by contractors Lagan and Arup.

CPH2 said the MFE110 will play an “important role” in NIW’s efforts to decarbonise its wastewater treatment operations, with the region a “key market” for the company.

The test signifies Northern Ireland’s first production of pure hydrogen and oxygen generated “reliably at scale”, CPH2 added.

CPH2 chief executive Jon Duffy said the successful test “proves that our technology is a current solution to green hydrogen production”.

CPH2 electrolyser UK — CPH2’s membrane free electrolyser

Duffy said his team is now “laser-focused” on advancing its next stage project, the 1 MW MFE220 electrolyser.

NIW director of business services Alistair Jinks said he is “extremely pleased” to have the first operational scale MFE electrolyser in Northern Ireland.

“While we have always taken pride in having a pioneering approach to sustainable water management, to have our vision become a reality is a special moment as we contribute to the hydrogen economy in Northern Ireland,” Jinks said.

“We look forward to continuing our relationship with CPH2 and continuing to push the boundaries of the transformative potential of hydrogen and oxygen in wastewater treatment.”

Northern Ireland green hydrogen

The CPH2 milestone comes amid efforts from Mutual Energy to establish a Greater Belfast Hydrogen Hub.

According to Mutual Energy, Northern Ireland has a “golden ticket” to develop a green hydrogen economy due to its significant renewable energy generation and underground salt cavern storage potential.

By constructing a 35km pipeline, Mutual Energy said the Belfast region can make use of planned offshore windfarms to produce hydrogen to decarbonise two of Northern Ireland’s gas-fired power stations.

The hydrogen hub could also assist Larne and Belfast ports and Belfast City Airport to decarbonise, Mutual said.

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Liquid cooling technologies: reducing data center environmental impact

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Clock synchronization allows for coordinated time-dependent communications between end points that might be cloud databases or in large global databases that could be sitting across the country or across the world, he said. “We saw recently when we were visiting Lawrence Berkeley Labs where they have all of these data sources such as radio telescopes, optical telescopes, satellites, the James Webb platform. All of these end points are taking snapshots of a piece of space, and they need to synchronize those snapshots to the picosecond level, because you want to detect things like meteorites, something that is moving faster than the rotational speed of planet Earth. So the only way you can detect that quickly is if you synchronize these snapshots at the picosecond level,” Pandey said. For security use cases, the chip can ensure that if an eavesdropper tries to intercept the quantum signals carrying the key, they will likely disturb the state of the qubits, and this disturbance can be detected by the legitimate communicating parties and the link will be dropped, protecting the sender’s data. This feature is typically implemented in a Quantum Key Distribution system. Location information can serve as a critical credential for systems to authenticate control access, Pandey said. The prototype quantum entanglement chip is just part of the research Cisco is doing to accelerate practical quantum computing and the development of future quantum data centers. The quantum data center that Cisco envisions would have the capability to execute numerous quantum circuits, feature dynamic network interconnection, and utilize various entanglement generation protocols. The idea is to build a network connecting a large number of smaller processors in a controlled environment, the data center warehouse, and provide them as a service to a larger user base, according to Cisco. The challenges for quantum data center network fabric

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Engineers rush to master new skills for AI-driven data centers

According to the Uptime Institute survey, 57% of data centers are increasing salary spending. Data center job roles that saw the highest increases were in operations management – 49% of data center operators said they saw highest increases in this category – followed by junior and mid-level operations staff at 45%, and senior management and strategy at 35%. Other job categories that saw salary growth were electrical, at 32% and mechanical, at 23%. Organizations are also paying premiums on top of salaries for particular skills and certifications. Foote Partners tracks pay premiums for more than 1,300 certified and non-certified skills for IT jobs in general. The company doesn’t segment the data based on whether the jobs themselves are data center jobs, but it does track 60 skills and certifications related to data center management, including skills such as storage area networking, LAN, and AIOps, and 24 data center-related certificates from Cisco, Juniper, VMware and other organizations. “Five of the eight data center-related skills recording market value gains in cash pay premiums in the last twelve months are all AI-related skills,” says David Foote, chief analyst at Foote Partners. “In fact, they are all among the highest-paying skills for all 723 non-certified skills we report.” These skills bring in 16% to 22% of base salary, he says. AIOps, for example, saw an 11% increase in market value over the past year, now bringing in a premium of 20% over base salary, according to Foote data. MLOps now brings in a 22% premium. “Again, these AI skills have many uses of which the data center is only one,” Foote adds. The percentage increase in the specific subset of these skills in data centers jobs may vary. The Uptime Institute survey suggests that the higher pay is motivating workers to stay in the

Microsoft will invest $80B in AI data centers in fiscal 2025

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John Deere unveils more autonomous farm machines to address skill labor shortage

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