The dams produce far more electricity than the utilities need for their own customers, so they have power to sell to other utilities, to industrial projects like aluminum smelters and to bitcoin miners. Three public utility districts - in Chelan, Douglas and Grant counties - own their own dams on the Columbia River: Rocky Reach and Rock Island for Chelan, Wanapum and Priest Rapids for Grant, and Wells for Douglas. Whether it’s a few servers in one hobbyist’s garage or rows of racks in warehouses, bitcoin mining machines consume power at rates comparable to what homes use, making electricity perhaps the biggest expense item in producing cryptocurrency, exceeding even that of the hardware needed to do the calculations.įortunately for the miners, there’s a place where electricity is plentiful, cheap and available: the mid-Columbia utilities of Washington. Whatever cryptocurrency mining actually is - and even enthusiasts have a hard time explaining how it works - it takes a lot of electricity to make it happen. This article appears in print in the April 2018 issue.
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