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Cryptocurrency Miners Are Building Their Own Electricity Infrastructure

posted by mrpg on Friday August 03 2018, @11:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the +- dept.

Fnord666 writes:

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

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 05 2018, @03:06PM (#717523)

    https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/rockwell-calutrons [atomicheritage.org]

    The calutrons involved high voltage electricity and the huge magnets. If you walked along the wooden catwalk over the magnet you could feel the tug of the magnetic field on the nails in your shoes. It was like walking through glue. People who worked on the calutrons would take their watch into the watch-maker and discover that it was all smashed inside. The magnetic field had grabbed the steel parts and yanked them out by the roots.

    You weren’t supposed to bring any magnetic material, any steel, anywhere near the magnet. If it got anywhere near the magnetic field then “Wham-o!” it would slam up against the calutron. One time they were bringing a big steel plate in and got too close to the magnetic field. The plate pinned some poor guy like a butterfly against the magnetic field. So the guys ran over to the boss and said, “Shut down the magnet! Shut down the magnet! We got to get that guy off.” And the boss replied, “I’ve been told the war is killing 300 people an hour. If we shut down the magnet, it will take days to get re‑stabilized and get production back up again, and that’s hundreds of lives. I’m not going to do that. You’re going to have to pry him off with two-by-fours.” Which is what they did. Luckily he wasn’t badly hurt, but that showed what our priorities were.