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En + Group, the world’s first low-carbon aluminum producer and the largest private sector hydroelectric generator, has entered its first cryptocurrency mining joint venture.
The new venture, called Bit +, will focus on building facilities that support crypto mining with a low carbon footprint. En + Group’s partner in Bit + is the Russian company BitRiver, which provides hosting services and turnkey solutions for large-scale institutional crypto mining operations.
BitRiver currently operates the largest data center offering colocation services for Bitcoin (BTC) mining in the Russian Federation and offers similar services across the country and to CIS neighbors.
The first result of the Bit + initiative is the installation of a new facility near the existing BitRiver data center in Bratsk, in the Irkutsk region of the Russian Federation. En + Group has committed 10 MW of electricity to the facility, which is made up of modular crypto mining units and is already operational. The companies plan to scale the facility’s capacity to approximately 40 MW.
For its initial phase, the facility is comprised of 14 modular units, each of which is a converted shipping container the size of a full-scale crypto mining data center. Each unit can accommodate up to 400 Bitmain S19 Pro miners.
In an official statement, En + Group provided context regarding the choice of the Irkutsk region and its apparent feasibility for low-carbon solutions for cryptocurrency mining:
“Our energy resources in the [Irkutsk] the region produces low-carbon and inexpensive electricity from renewable sources and we are able to offer surplus energy to these partnerships. In addition, the low annual average temperature reduces the energy required by data centers, making them more efficient and further minimizing their carbon footprint. “
As reported, high energy consumption remains an Achilles’ heel for the cryptocurrency industry, especially coins like Bitcoin, whose consensus algorithm is computationally intensive and therefore requires exceptionally high levels of energy to maintain.
Several energy experts have attempted to redirect the energy debate surrounding Bitcoin away from energy consumption. Instead, they focused on analyzing where energy is produced and how it is generated, and argued that it is very important to ensure that less harmful choices are made in the power generation phase.
With financial and geopolitical players entering the final game of global climate policy, it remains to be seen to what extent making cryptocurrency energy consumption greener, rather than aiming to reduce it, will be enough to make the sector truly sustainable.
