Giga Watt Going Forward
Giga Watt has been making great progress growing the team while continuing to build out new infrastructure. Our new 30MW Pangborn site will be the largest site of its kind in North America, while also constructing the largest privately owned substation in our area. The Giga Watt team has been working diligently to improve our pods, our processes and our customer service and support.
Lawsuit settled: When we started our project, we were hit by construction delays that were inherent, common, and out of our control. As a result, a lawsuit was filed that, among other things, included a complaint criticizing the pace of development at our East Wenatchee site. We reiterated our standing offers to refund customers their original USD investments for anyone who had bought into that phase of our project. By our estimate, customers who used attorneys ended up paying up to 35% of the refund as legal success fees! We never intended to see our customers waiting for deployments, but we offered multiple ways to mitigate the situation as best we know how (and continue to do so).
Pod deployment continues: We now operate Washington State facilities in Ephrata, Moses Lake and George, in addition to our facilities in East Wenatchee and Pangborn office park. At Moses Lake, we have fully deployed eight pods, and there are another three facilities there adding to our mining capacity. At Pangborn, we have 24 pods in various states from foundation to fully completed. Power is expected to energize at Pangborn within 30 days. Additional sites are in construction in Moses Lake and Quincy, WA as well. By mid-year, Giga Watt will have over 50 MW of facility power in operation.
Low-cost electricity remains a differentiator: Pacific Northwest is blessed with an abundance of hydro-electric power. Surplus power is sold off to large cities, and the revenue subsidizes the cost of power county-by-county. Our electricity rate is currently 2.8 cents per Kilowatt-hour (kWh). That’s among the lowest price in the world.
Coal-powered mining may not be sustainable: Worldwide, demand for electricity to mine digital currencies is on the rise. One Australian utility is bringing a retired coal plant back online to provide energy to a cryptocurrency miner. In our opinion, this is not the way to go. Bitcoin mining makes around 20c/kWh right now but will get pushed down towards 10c/kWh within two years. With coal plant power price of the Australian facility between 5c to 8c/kWh, plus 1c — 2c/kWh for overhead costs, the facility will only be operating at break even. We will never expose our customers to unreasonable electricity costs, even if it means our growth is slower.
International support for green mining grows: Our use of hydro-electric power aligns with an emerging industry trend to use green energy sources for cryptocurrency mining. Bitmain, the world’s largest crypto mining company, set up a hub in Switzerland, where there’s affordable hydropower. And energy companies in Iceland, where there is cheap geothermal power, are reporting surges in demand from crypto miners. However, some of these locations may not be the best choice for crypto mining in that they have fluctuating or higher power costs than what is available in the Pacific Northwest. Giga Watt is committed to focusing only on sites with optimum long-term economics for our customers.
What’s on the horizon? Giga Watt and Leonardo Render are bringing a new opportunity to our mining customers. CGI Rendering is best known as the process of using computing power to produce synthetic images, such as for animated Hollywood movies. Additionally, rendering is used extensively by many industries from architecture to retail. This presents a huge opportunity for Giga Watt’s customers to earn more crypto by mining for premium projects like Leonardo Render.
Our approach to mining gives you a way to grow your accounts. To complement our core service, we will offer multiple ways to use and exchange your cryptocoins. Stay tuned for more details.
Thank you for your business, we look forward to sharing more Giga Watt news in future newsletters. If you know someone who would be interested in hearing more about our efforts, please forward this email to them.
“Giga Watt is using the business of cryptocurrency mining to introduce all forms of computing-as-a-service. In the near future, customers of Giga Watt will begin to see opportunities to do mining for a variety of supercomputing activities. This experience will be just like Bitcoin mining — i.e. running compute servers in exchange for cryptocurrency rewards.” — Dave Carlson, CEO, Giga Watt
