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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: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @01:07AM (2 children)
Ah, so not much of a reason then.
Doesn't sound like it from the story you wrote.
In other words, wind power was a terrible investment in the 2005 timeframe and you were right to stay away. I can't help but notice a complete absence of the concerns you've expressed so far in this thread. The interesting thing here is that we're moving into a situation where the absolutely cheapest power in the absolutely cheapest areas of the world, no matter how isolated can be profitable and readily converted into goods traded globally (assuming some sort of market for this sort of low communication bandwidth, coarse parallelism computation sticks around).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday August 09 2018, @02:10AM (1 child)
Yes, from a purely monetary gain perspective. The efficiency of the turbines, reduction in greenhouse gases and various pollutions emitted by coal and oil production were there in 2005, but the economics wasn't.
What is stranger still, is if I had simply leaped instead of looking and bought 250 acres for $125,000 thinking I might be starting a wind farm, less than a year later I could have sold those 250 acres for $750,000 outright, or leased them to farmers for an even bigger ROI than that by now. And the net benefits of growing millions of tons of extra corn so we can water down gasoline with some ethanol? Pretty pale in comparison to reducing coal mining, IMO.
Even more ironic, if the timing were slightly different, say purchasing the land in 2003 and actually starting the wind farm with a marginal ROI, the big "windfall" from ethanol legislation would still have come, because corn farming is 100% compatible dual-use with wind farming on the same land.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday August 09 2018, @10:25AM
Wouldn't be an investment otherwise.
This sort of speculation is pointless unless you have a time machine.