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The SanShangLiang industrial park in remote Inner Mongolia and the shores of the Columbia River in eastern Washington state seem to have little in common. The former is a shuttered industrial coal mining district and the latter the pristine backyard of North America’s largest hydroelectric dams. Yet both regions have exploited their natural resources to produce some of the lowest cost electricity on the planet. And as cheap power sources, both are host to the world’s largest virtual currency mining operations.
Being a captive audience to low-cost power may no longer be a competitive advantage. As the renewable energy economy expands, the economics of power generation and, consequently, cryptocurrency mining are rapidly changing. Since Bitcoin started its meteoric rise in 2014, levelized renewable energy costs (i.e., for wind and solar) have fallen below those of the lowest cost fossil fuel, coal, and are still falling. Positioning for the clean competitive environment, Sweden’s Envion has produced portable cryptocurrency mining operations that can be opportunistically relocated to the lowest cost energy sources worldwide.
Dirty digital money
The world’s power-hungry digital currency mining operations suck up 32 TWh of power annually, almost doubling energy consumption over 2016. On the high estimates side, Bitcoin electricity consumption is forecasted to equal total global energy consumption by 2020 (21,776 TWh). More conservatively, if Bitcoin mining energy consumption were to maintain its three-year annual compound growth rate of 59 percent, by the end of 2020, it would be in 32nd place in energy consumption by country, one place behind the United Arab Emirates.
Currently, about half of mining takes place in China where it is powered by coal, the fossil fuel with the highest C02 emissions. At the current rate of crypto mining energy consumption growth, global carbon emission reduction commitments would be unsustainable. The move towards next generation farms powered by renewable energy is already underway. GMO Internet, the Japanese trading and internet technology company, is one of the mining farms setting up in Kazuno City, Japan, a region with abundant renewable energy sources. In addition to running its mining farm on renewable energy, GMO will use seven-inch semiconductor chips, which are 2.5 times more energy efficient than the current 12-inch wafers.
Mobile and modular mining workers
The inability to ship electricity to other parts of the globe like oil or natural gas and has required business operations with high power needs to locate close to affordable power generation sources. Envion saw the opportunity to produce a new model for smaller scale yet high energy intensity digital business operations.
Envion has placed cryptocurrency mining operations in a portable box—a travel-friendly shipping container. The Mobile Mining Units (MMUs) can be easily shipped to any low-cost power source in the world and operate at different temperature extremes. An advanced cooling system uses less than one percent of the system energy, a significant advance over older generation mining farms that used over 30 tons of metal fans to keep 25,000 mining machines cool. In contrast, the all-in-one MMU solution can be easily scaled up and distributed to take advantage of the lowest energy costs as mining operations grow. The portable mining operations seamlessly connect to smart grids to flexibly respond to changes in energy loads.
The clean mining edge
With over half a dozen companies announcing virtual currency mining farms in recent months, mining farming costs are bound to decline. But mining profitability is also declining. Virtual currency mining profitability is determined by electricity cost, computational power (hashrate), and power consumption. A virtual currency ‘block’ is minted, or produced, by the first miner to solve a cryptographic puzzle (or ‘hash’). As the puzzles become more complex, miners are continuously increasing computational power, and thus electricity usage, to gain a winner’s edge.
Miners could see their competitive edge erode on large-scale mining farms where arrangements have including colocation, leasing, franchising and soon, cloud services. In 2017, Japanese entertainment company DMM entered the mining race with a ‘mass-scale’ mining farm that will provide virtual currency mining on the cloud.
The Envion mobile mining unit allows miners to compete on cost and differentiation on a number of fronts. Miners can make strategic decisions on how to opportunistically exploit low-cost energy sources anywhere in the world. Additional revenue streams can be created by selling the recycled thermal energy for heating in building, greenhouses and warehouses. In addition to basic ASIC workers, miners can choose to use proprietary GPU-based rigs and custom configurations.
The Envion (EVN) ICO
The EVN token pre-sale started on Dec. 15th with an entry price of $0.70 per EVN token and a cap of 150 mln tokens. Token buyers also become dividend holders will receive a payout on proprietary mining operations of 100 percent (75 percent immediately and 25 percent reinvested) and 35 percent from non-proprietary operations.
$5 MILLION CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR INVESTOR CAPS OFF ENVION’S BLOWOUT $30 MILLION WEEKEND & UP TO NINE FIGURES TPO DEAL
A major investor made a massive splash with a $5M ticket to lead this weekend’s USD 31,000,000 combined investment, eyeing a third-party-operations deal up to nine figures after the ICO and boosting envion’s ICO fast towards its goal. The 20%-discounted second investment round has already begun. Be a part of the change and invest NOW in one of the most exciting and valuable tokens: www.envion.org
Source: CCN