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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  996 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Private-equity firm revives zombie fossil-fuel power plant to mine bitcoin

This is so dumb. But it gives some insight into the metrics.

If we back into it, 116,000 Th/s will get us 1BTC/day.

Let's assume Antminer S9s. Those give us 13 Th/s and take 1.3kW ea. Hey that's convenient, we're at 1tH/s per kWh.

1186 BTC in one year is 3.25 BTC/day. That's 377,000 Th/S which, conveniently, is 377MW/h, or 15.7 MW of capacity. Call it 16MW.

Again, I'm going to invite WanderingEng to look at me because it's nice having a power engineer to tell you you're full of shit... but I've helped spec 20MW standby power generation and... I mean...

A CAT 3516 is 2MW. 8 CAT 3516s is 16MW. Ballpark it at 120gal/hr. Number 2 diesel is $1.91 in bulk - call it 2ish bucks. I'm burning $1900/hr cranking out 16MW, or 12 cents per kWH (assuming the generators were free and never break).

We're not doing diesel, though, we're doing natural gas, which is going to be 200k BTU per hour per 2MW. Electric price is $3 bucks or so, industrial price, per thousand BTU. So I think I'm looking at $533/hr in gas, or 3.3 cents per kWh.

But that's because they get to buy it as an industrial power production facility, not a commercial facility.

Here's the plant. They've got 14MW making 5.5 BTC per day, as it turns out. It's got a capacity of 100MW. Considering it was "once abandoned" it seems to me that if the local communities stopped buying power from them, they cease to be a utility.

Which would more than double their gas prices.

And raise their costs of operation above that of a wind farm.

Dunno, man. This looks like regulatory arbitrage to me. Get rid of the arbitrage, get rid of the bitcoin miners.





WanderingEng  ·  995 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I think all your math looks good except for one thing: the natural gas genset you linked is probably more efficient than this plant because the plant uses a boiler. These purpose built engines can be much more efficient than a boiler. Side note: there's still a natural gas boiler here in town with a water outlet into the lake. I've swam through it, and it's incredibly warm. Like warm bathtub warm, even when the rest of the lake is mild. Thankfully the plant doesn't run much anymore.

A couple thoughts overall:

I don't think the local community can do anything to stop buying power from them. From what I gather from the article, the generator is connected to the grid but from a metering perspective outputs nothing. Generators have always had auxiliary load, especially coal and nuclear plants with big pumps and pulverizers. Those are all netted with plant output. It seems they have their miners all hooked up on the plant side of the metering. They are selling power to nobody but themselves.

The way to kill this plant is to eliminate once-through cooling. Make them build a cooling tower and the plant will die overnight.

About wind farms, and solar will have the same problem: the capital cost of the miners is a major expense, so they want zero downtime. While they could net against a wind or solar plant, they'd have to stop mining when the wind dies down or the sun sets. They could buy power from the grid, but now they expose themselves to utility pricing which could open them up to higher rates for crypto mining.

kleinbl00  ·  995 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Cooling towers are cool. Everyone should build cooling towers. I developed a great deal of respect when I got to tour the UW powerplant and see the bitchin' cooling tower. If I were an eccentric billionaire I'd make a house shaped like a giant fuckin' cooling tower just to make people wonder.

Crypto private equity dweebs should definitely have to build cooling towers.

ButterflyEffect  ·  995 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Is that photo from Satsop? That's a place every probably 18 months pops back into my mind as a place that would be really interesting to check out.

WanderingEng  ·  995 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I have a thing for abandoned places, better yet if it's abandoned infrastructure, and best is abandoned electric power. There are a number of abandoned, incomplete nuclear power plants scattered across the country and world! None near me, just cancelled plans before they started construction. One property was an army air targeting range in the '40s and '50s, sold to the utility who planned to build a nuclear plant there, and when that fell through the property was sold and became a golf course.

kleinbl00  ·  995 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hells yeah that's Satsop.

I've driven by it a dozen times but it's never occurred to me to go visit.