Power Prospector

Stake a claim on sunlight. Overbuild solar, run the nights on batteries, and bank surplus as hydrogen for the dark week. Can an off-grid data center beat gas at the latest price snapshot?

Pick a site

Each site opens on its cheapest build that serves at least 99.9% of load. Hourly 2024 weather (ERA5 via Open-Meteo) run through a single-axis tracker model. Dot color = DC capacity factor.

Capacity factor17% → 34%

Dispatch, hour by hour

A flat 1.0 load. The week shown defaults to the one that leans hardest on hydrogen.

Hydrogen in storage, through the year

Claims office

Best staked builds, ranked by effective cost (power plus the value of GPUs left dark).

Assay:

Effective cost of firm power
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Against the incumbents, $/MWh

Where the money goes, $/MWh

The project

Site plan, to scale

Build

Model assumptions
  • Load is flat, 1.0 per unit. Figures scale linearly; totals quoted for a 100 MW campus.
  • Solar is DC-coupled (no inverters) straight to the batteries, the electrolyzer and the data center's DC bus. PV output uses 2024 hourly irradiance and temperature with a 13% derate.
  • Surplus goes to the daily battery, then iron-air, then the electrolyzer; the rest is clipped. Deficits draw on the daily battery, then iron-air, then the hydrogen generator.
  • The daily battery charges at up to C/4 and discharges at up to 1.0 load. Iron-air charges and discharges at up to 1.0 load.
  • Lifetimes: solar 30 yr, daily battery 15, iron-air 20, electrolyzer 10, hydrogen storage 30, generator 20. O&M runs 1–2%/yr of capex.
  • Gas reference: $1,500/kW recips or turbines with 15% redundancy, 8.5 MMBtu/MWh heat rate, Henry Hub + $1.00 delivery, $4/MWh variable O&M. Diesel reference: $700/kW gensets at 14.5 kWh/gal and the pump price (not permitted for prime power in most US air districts).
  • H₂ cost prices electrolyzer power at the site's own solar LCOE. Surplus that would otherwise be clipped is really free, so this cost is an upper bound.
  • Hydrogen generator: the 30% LHV efficiency in the first three presets is a design target provided by the project owner (2026-09-30), and their $300/kW capex is a placeholder. Set your own.
  • Physical units: 650 W back-contact modules; 4.5 acres per MW DC on trackers; 5 MWh per 20-ft battery container; about 1 t of H₂ per tube-trailer; 1.8 kW per GPU all in (GB300-class including cooling); 1,000M tokens per MWh and $3 per 1M tokens (terraform-simulator.com defaults); data center at 4 MW per acre.
  • Site optima: the cheapest of 7,680 builds per site that serves at least 99.9% of load, at the “2026 sunbelt” prices.
  • Auto-assay searches a coarser grid of 2,160 builds (array 4–10× load) from the build on screen, and keeps that build when no grid build beats it.