To Washington State.
In continuation with the previous pieces we published highlighting the popularity of certain states in the US for bitcoin mining, we move next to the northwest: Washington State. Although Washington state may not be the most popular state in the US, it is home to the major city of Seattle and borders Canada.
Located on the similar latitude line as New York State, Washington also shares a similar geographical climate and topology. Washington’s residents are mostly situated within the Seattle metropolitan area. The rest of the state includes deep vast rainforests in the west, scattered long mountains in the northeast and far southeast, and a large basin area in the east, central and south. And due to its vast mountain ranges, rivers and dams are also abundant as they are in New York State. Washington has more than a thousand dams, including the Grand Coulee Dam, built for a variety of purposes including irrigation, electricity generation, flood control, and water storage.
Matter of fact, the scenery brought by the sprawling mountainous landscape of Washington State, really has provided the area with a lot of beautiful national parks such as the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
Besides being the home to multinational corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks, all of the above factors have given way to bitcoin miners finding the area ideal for ASIC mining. Back in Central Washington’s Mid-Columbia Basin — a region famous for apple orchards, beautiful state parks and hydroelectric production — cryptocurrency miners remain attached to plentiful power and some of the lowest energy rates in the country, as well as cool air (giant banks of crypto-computers produce a ton of heat) and commercial rents that are a fraction of those 150 miles west. (1)
“County-wide energy use from cryptomining customers is now about 2–4 average megawatts — well below our 5% threshold — and we credit Rate Schedule 17 (Grant County’s adjusted rate schedule) for keeping demand from these evolving industries in check,” says Grant County PUD spokesperson Christine Pratt. She remembers when the volume of new hook-up requests received from cryptocurrency businesses during the last big spike in 2017 totaled approximately 2,000 megawatts of power — or more than three times what the utility needed to power the entire county. (1)
Certain counties in Washington state, for example, Chelan, Douglas, and Grant counties were the target of the 2017 bitcoin boom when miners, as far as China, came into town to take advantage of the low electricity rates located there. The public utility districts in those counties have seen an uptick in electricity requirements in the past year but not to the extent of what they saw back in 2017. One of the pivotal reasons for the lack of increase in interest is due to those counties’ increase in power rates, specifically for miners since then.
The uniqueness of the counties of Chelan, Douglas, and Grant areas is that they are located in a basin. Residential customers in the basin pay as little as 2.33 cents a kilowatt-hour, compared with around 12 cents in Seattle and a US national average of 13.6 cents. (2)
The basin’s largest bitcoin miner, Malachi Salcido, uses about 35 megawatts to run around 20,000 mining units and generates, supposedly about 3 bitcoins a day.
To mine bitcoin profitably now requires “some serious economies of scale,” says Salcido, who reckons that a commercial startup today needs a minimum of 4,000 servers and a $15 million investment to be worth doing.
The Columbia River and the Columbia River basin, are the main sources of hydro energy being sought after by bitcoin miners. Nicknamed, the River of the West, the Columbia River itself runs 1,243 miles and is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest of North America. The river starts from the Rocky Mountains of Canada and runs south into Washington state before emptying out into the Pacific Ocean.
The 14 hydroelectric dams on the Columbia’s main stem and many more on its tributaries produce more than 44 percent of total US hydroelectric generation. Production of nuclear power has taken place at two sites along the river.
The Columbia’s heavy flow and large elevation drop over a short distance, 2.16 feet per mile (40.9 cm/km), give it tremendous capacity for hydroelectricity generation. In comparison, the Mississippi drops less than 0.65 feet per mile (12.3 cm/km). The Columbia alone possesses one-third of the United States’s hydroelectric potential.[131] In 2012, the river and its tributaries accounted for 29 GW of hydroelectric generating capacity, contributing 44 percent of the total hydroelectric generation in the nation.
The Columbia River pours more water into the Pacific Ocean than any other river in North or South America. (3)
Washington State is a far ways from Texas and New York, the other 2 popular states for bitcoin mining, but the Columbia River has been a source of electric abundance that miners are hungry for.
Sources:
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