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Access to cheap electricity can make or break a cryptocurrency mining operation, and firms angling to strike it rich in an industry where delays can and will cost digital money will do just about anything to get it, as soon as they can.
The latest move in the quest for bargain-basement kilowatt hours, as quickly as possible: building out local power grids with bespoke electrical substations.
Canadian company DMG Blockchain is building what it hopes will be a fully-functioning substation near the Southern British Columbia town of Castlegar, which is electrified by hydro power. When I spoke to Steven Eliscu, who leads corporate development for DMG, over the phone, he told me that building the substation costs millions of dollars and required the company to build its own access road to haul equipment to the site. The goal: to plug it into the local grid and have it power DMG's expanded mining operations by September.
"At the end of August we'll go through a commissioning process where the utility will test everything as a completed substation and make sure that the town doesn't blow up when we flip the switch," Eliscu told me over the phone.
Source: MotherBoard
(Score: 4, Informative) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday August 04 2018, @05:02AM
It's vitally important to recycle aluminum cans even if they don't have the bottle bill deposit, because prodigious quantities of electricity are required to refine aluminum ore.
It is so very difficult to refine aluminum that at one time aluminum was more valuable than gold. The top of the Washington Monument is fitted with several aluminum spikes to serve as lightning rod. Aluminum because it was such an incredibly precious metal when they built it.
My father, a power EE, told me that Reynolds Aluminum paid for part of the construction of some pacific northwest dams so one of each dam's generators could be directly connected to one of Reynold's aluminum refineries.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]