Greenidge Generation’s natural gas-fired power plant, located in Finger Lakes, New York, USA, started its own bitcoin mining business and started a system that could earn 5.8BTC per day with 7,000 computers.
Usually, large-scale cryptocurrency mining companies always look for countries and regions where electricity is cheap, and when electricity providers increase their prices, they look for a place where electricity is cheap. However, this machine is installed as a so-called BTM (behind the meter) facility and operates on surplus power. Therefore, it is said that the operating cost is quite low. Greenage Generation explains that electricity costs are low enough, and in reality, only production costs can be offset by other power-related services. The power plant capacity is 106MW, and this mining machine uses 15MW.
Bitcoin is expected to reach its half-life around May 2020. The half-life of cryptocurrency is the point at which the reward price for the mined block decreases by half.At first, if you create one block, you get 50BTC rewards, but the half-life in 2012 and 2016 comes and is currently set at 12.5BTC per block. Greenage Generation expects it will still generate profits even with the next half-life. For reference, the Bitcoin issuance limit is set at 21 million BTC.
In addition to the Bitcoin mining of Greenage Generation, the difficulty of mining increases as time passes, so profits will not increase someday. Nevertheless, considering the short-term profits, there is a possibility that companies like Tesla that imitate a cheaper cost recovery method than installing huge battery facilities. Related information can be found here .