Microgrid Mastery
Rethinking Bitcoin Mining for an Integrated Future
Miners are accustomed to remote locations and harsh conditions. We’re not roughnecks, but we’re the roughnecks of IT.
Utility sites can be… a bit cushier, particularly if they’re built for tours by executives and school children. Fifteen minutes from an airport with 115 gates? Amazing. Air-conditioned building with flush toilets, and a lunch room – palatial!
This is the Mt. Holly North Carolina Microgrid Innovation Lab. The site power is completely generated onsite. It is an off-grid island, but it can also sync with the grid and test practically anything, with anything. They have all the media-darlings of emerging grid technologies: hydrolyzers, fuel cells, microturbines, solar panels, EV fast-chargers, and now mining!
Navier connected them up with the help of MicroBT and HeatCore. It is a modest demonstration-scale mining rack. Or, maybe it’s the F1 car of mining. A hundred kilowatts of water-cooled mining are packed into half a server rack. In the bottom half of the rack, the cooling pump skid is built with premium components and shiny stainless. Outside, there’s a dry cooler with a beast of a variable speed axial-fan.
It looks pretty for the tours. For miners, it’s not for art – it’s the hash rate, power rate, and uptime.
It’s little, but decently mighty. The mine is comfortably cranking out a few PH/s without much attention. This is more impressive to staff and visitors who aren’t accustomed to quadrillions of calculations per second. Maybe more impressive to us is that it sits quietly across the bay from the site director’s office and engineers working in an open concept lab.
Beyond a show-piece, the mine is a functioning part of the site. It is able to automatically turn down and resume, following generation, when a cloud shades their solar panels briefly. Or it can respond to other loads preemptively, such as when an electric vehicle plugs into charge. The controls wizards at Axiom Technologies integrated the mine with the site controls using the utility’s protocol of choice, OpenADR. This was made to work, however a more conventionally deployed solution was requested. The team at Foreman Mine Management Software showed up to implement their solution, which seems to be working well for the facility testing.
The back-office team members are taking notes, observing the operation and testing, and building models. They’re extrapolating to the macro, and working to apply this to their service territory – millions of customers in a half-dozen states.
Bitcoin miners have long toyed with the idea that the power industry and mining are complementary. Quite obviously, energy is the foundation of proof-of-work. No one at Navier would bat an eye at a sci-fi future where the two worlds have merged, where the peaks and valleys of all major grids are smoothed by mining loads.
Most miners across the world probably understand utilities better than the average person: PPAs, interconnect agreements, LMPs, distribution, transmission, etc. Work at the Microgrid Lab is, literally, a very small representation of the mining space, and Navier is proud to do our part in shaping the future.
