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Costa Rica Hydro Plant Revivified For Crypto Mining (yahoo.com) 83

Posted by BeauHD from the adapting-to-the-times dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A defunct hydro plant in Costa Rica is getting a new lease on life by powering crypto mining, and bringing clean energy to a rapidly expanding business. More than 650 machines from 150 customers operate non-stop from this plant next to the Poas River, just outside of capital city San Jose. Costa Rica generates nearly all its energy from green sources, where the state has a monopoly on energy distribution. But the government stopped buying electricity due to surplus power in the country, forcing the plant to reinvent itself.

Eduardo Kooper is the owner of Data Center CR and the plant. "We had a lot of power, but we did nothing with it. We had to pause activity for nine months. We looked for many alternatives -- from making fried food, frozen food -- everything that used a lot of energy. Just a year ago, someone told me about Bitcoin, blockchain, and digital mining." Kooper, skeptical at first, learned that the crypto mining business requires a lot of energy, much of which comes from fossil fuels. The company invested $500,000 to venture into hosting digital mining computers. "Our market is the international miner who is looking for better conditions," said Kooper. "That miner is looking for clean energy, cheap energy that is economically viable, and looking for internet connection, where he finds it is where that miner is going to go."
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Costa Rica Hydro Plant Revivified For Crypto Mining More

Costa Rica Hydro Plant Revivified For Crypto Mining

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  • How is this news I should care about??

    • How is this news I should care about??

      They posted it so you could have something to bitch about....

  • Why?? (Score:2)

    by e3m4n ( 947977 )
    Why does anything GREEN ENERGY need crypto mining to 'breathe life back into it' or 'save it'? Is that new fangled coal power thats been going around threatening the horse and buggy industry? Sounds like miss management to me

    • Sounds like miss management to me.

      I think she prefers ms. management. :-)

    • There was too little demand for power in Costa Rica, so the government shut it down.

      • Its a fairly growing market. Ive known a couple different people who retired, sold their homes for around $300k in profit, and bought homes in costa rica cheap enough that they now have maid service living very comfortably. Its hard to believe there is an excess of power to the extent they would shut down a hydro electric plant. Its he sort of place that if you won the lottery, you would do really well by moving there.
        • Rather than Costa Rica, you could move to Central or Eastern Europe for your retirement. The economic benefit is the same and the environment is much better.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by e3m4n ( 947977 )
            My concern with first world areas is that inflation is a recipe for death. Once you retire its a fixed income more or less... so you have to be able to live on X amount till demise. At one time I thought that just paying off my house would do it, because then I would just have to keep up with property taxes which would cut down on monthly expenses. Now, I realize that every few years my greedy overspending local government will just keep upping property values every time they need to cover budget shortfalls

        • Then argue with the people who wrote the article. According to them, supply exceeded demand. The hydro plant in question probably had the highest cost of operation of all available options.

    • Because in Costa Rica there is a government owned monopoly on electric distribution, and the public owned company refused to buy power from private generators for ideological reasons, even if it was cheaper and cleaner from them than their own generation.
      They cannot deliver the power to anybody outside their facilities, so they were forced to shut down.

      Installing local cryto farms inside their facilities allows them to reopen and hire back their employees, there are many cases like this one, others are tryi

  • They couldn't find anything better? (Score:3)

    by GlennC ( 96879 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @10:19AM (#62167031)

    They couldn't sell the electricity to neighboring countries?

    They couldn't work with Amazon, IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft to host a portion of their cloud infrastructure?

    Perhaps they're simply applying the lesson from the 19th Century American Gold Rush where the people most likely to make money were the ones selling equipment to the gold miners.

    • Maybe, but this has the environmental bonus of driving down profitability in places where electricity comes at cost.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by pjt33 ( 739471 )

      Wikipedia may not be up to date, but it says that the regional electrical interchange system (SIEPAC) has a capacity of 600MW, whereas the production capacity of the larger geothermal and hydroelectrical plants of Costa Rica alone is more than 1600MW, so it's quite likely that a small producer couldn't sell the electricity to neighbouring countries.

    • Reuters says that the company owns 3 hydro plants, with a production capacity of 3MW. So it's pretty small. It powers a datacenter, part of which is leased to crypto miners.

      I assume the DC is too small for large cloud providers to care about. Or that the availability of cheap electricity will be temporary.... the reason the power is available is because the state monopoly stopped buying power due to the pandemic downturn. Also: earthquakes.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by NFN_NLN ( 633283 )

      > They couldn't work with Amazon, IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft to host a portion of their cloud infrastructure?

      Hyperscalers work on economies of scale. Would you like them to clear cut a large swaths of the Costa Rican jungle to make room for a Region with 3 large and independent Availability Zones, roads in and out, dig up the jungle for large bandwidth connectivity that surely didn't exist before and truck in diesel for reserve generators since a region requires guaranteed uptime in a country with spotty

    • That's right they can't sell it to neighboring countries....and they can't even sell it inside the country..legislation to change this would take years and would face heavy opposition...we I port electricity from other countries at higher rates than the ones paid to these guys (before they got cut off that is )

    • The ideal use of excess renewable electricity that can't be used to replace fossil power would be running an atmospheric carbon capture and sequestration plant. While wasting power on an anti-efficient Internet funny money scheme is a horrendous waste by comparison, at least this horrendous waste isn't spewing fossil carbon into the biosphere in the process...

      • Great idea! Why weren't people thinking the same thing on the ground?

        Probably because nobody showed up with stacks of USD offering to build an alkane-synthesis plant adjacent to the hydropower facility. It was easier to just let some bitcoiners move in to a datacenter already in the region.

        • Sounds like at least 2 environmental policy failures (and 1 monetary policy failure).

          • How many "green" alkane synthesis facilities are there worldwide, much less in Central America? Hydrocarbons-from-the-air style facilities are still mostly experimental. Did you really think anyone in Costa Rica is on the cutting edge of hydrocarbon synthesis?

    • No, they can't.

      Costa Rica has a government owned monopoly on electric distribution. The public owned company that can distribute refused to buy from private generators because of ideological reasons and they were forced to shutdown because their electricity could not be delivered to anybody.

      Installing local crypto farms next to the generating facility allows them to regain operation and hire back their employees... there are many cases like this, some are trying to do better things like green hydrogen gener

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      There probably is no good grid in place to sell the power elsewhere.

  • Sounds like a very small powerplant, probably maxed out at 1megawatt by the sounds of it (650 machines at ~>1kw each). Is there a better use for the power? Probably, but they don't produce enough of it to sell, so why not make some money selling it to miners? I think this is a fringe case where there are a few small plants like this around looking for an outlet(pun alert!) and crypto might not be the best use, but if it's the only customer that can help them turn a profit, and it's "green" - why not?

  • Learned something new (Score:5, Informative)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @11:40AM (#62167093) Journal
    I looked at the headline and thought, " 'revivify'? That can't be a proper word! Surely they meant 'revive' and got tripped up."

    But then I do some poking around, and it appears that it is a proper word. "Revivify" is basically the same as "Revive", although "revive" is usually applied to human and other living things, while "revivify" is applied to non-living physical objects (like a power plant), organizations, or abstract concepts.
    • I first heard that word (revivify) in the movie Blade Runner 2049, thought it was weird too
      • I first saw it in Secret of Mana, and I also thought it was weird.

        • I learned it from Final Fantasy VI, where the Revivify item is used to remove the Zombie status, whilst Phoenix Downs are used to revive someone who's been killed.

    • Revivify is only a 3rd level spell, and requires 300 GP worth of diamonds, while resurrection is a 7th level spell requiring a 1000 GP diamond. Unfortunately, you can only cast revivify within a minute of death.

    • I think most readers would have understood what was meant if they had used "revive". Headline author just wanted to sound more photosynthesis.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      Yeah... I found that word an interesting choice too.

      But while less grammatically correct? It would have sounded cooler to use "reanimate".

  • This is just Ada, one of several Proof of Stake top 10-15 cryptos:

    A big advantage of Cardano is that it's an eco-friendly crypto. For an easy comparison, here's how much energy [fool.com] Cardano, Bitcoin, and Ethereum are estimated to use per year:

    Cardano: Six gigawatt hours
    Bitcoin: 130 terawatt hours
    Ethereum: 50 terawatt hours
    Keep in mind that one terawatt is equal to 1,000 gigawatts. Put another way, Bitcoin uses about as much energy as Argentina, which has about 45 million people. Cardano uses about as much as 600

    • Re:In before the usual "crypto is all a waste" cro (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Wednesday January 12, 2022 @12:02PM (#62167179)
      So how do you make money? What products do you make or what services do you provide? Ah yes, nothing, just wasting computer cycles where they could have been used in something more productive. Even with proof of stake, it's a complete waste of electricity and computer power. Somebody else said it as well, and I'll repeat. We could have been using that energy for protein folding, seti at home, etc. Use power cycles to do something USEFUL. But no, dangle a dollar and sound high-tech and apparently that's how you get people these days.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by jythie ( 914043 )
        The 'proof of stake' counterargument is a rather fascinating one. In a way it is almost an admission of defeat, solving the 'problem' of too much democracy with putting power back in the hands of large sakeholders while not really addressing the energy usage problem like it claims. So it is a fun example of 'counter argument against X, which does nothing for X but DOES address Y which the quiet voice actually wants'.

        • Proof of Work isn't democratic. It inevitably results in consolidation of hashpower.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jythie ( 914043 )
            Which is even sadder since it means they are trying to eliminate something that is not there, or are just hoping to shift power away from the people who have the hashpower to, well, themselves.

      • Which computer cycles is he wasting now? Did you even read what he posted?

        • Yes I read it. Maybe you can tell me, and show me how ignorant I am. How do you magically make money with all the latest and greatest green energy super efficient cryptocurrency. What do you do? What does the computer do? What service is being provided to anybody, or what product is being made?
          By the way, I don't believe that betting and gambling (aka speculation and investment on fairy dust) are legit ways to make money, regardless of how the global economy supports these channels, so don't tell be abou

          • By the way, I don't believe that betting and gambling (aka speculation and investment on fairy dust) are legit ways to make money, regardless of how the global economy supports these channels, so don't tell be about that.

            So you're detached from the reality the rest of us inhabit. Thanks for clarifying that.

          • So I caught you making a boilerplate response to the guy promoting Proof of Stake and now you're trying to cover it up by changing your narrative.

            Let me spell it out for you.

            Proof of Stake requires far less energy to operate than Proof of Work. Period. You can not legitimately ask, "oh why can't you use all that computational power for something good like F@H?" when there isn't enough computational power being used to make a dent in dc computing project workloads. Maybe if you were talking about certain

            • I'm not changing any narrative, and you still didn't answer to my simple question, but you are quick to attack me. You can dance around the topic all you like. Besides betting on their value, these "coins" are a complete waste, no matter what algorithms you use.
              Again, simple question. I buy a computer and I want to make money with ethereum. What do I produce or what service do I provide? Me or my computer. Goods or services.
              I read that with PoS you "stake" to earn more crypto, which is like an inbred

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Hank21 ( 6290732 )
        I could apply the same logic to all the power wasted at Facebooks datacenters... Or Google's or... Well, you get the point. What people choose to do with the energy is up to them. I might not like it. In this case, they are turning energy into $$. I agree at your initial thought that it's a "waste of energy that could be used for something morally more productive", but who's to say? The operators are getting $$ from "wasting" the energy, and who's to say they won't use that $$ to do some "good" l ike buy

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by RobinH ( 124750 )
        Yeah, crypto buffs don't seem to get this. It's true our currencies that we use now aren't "backed" by anything, but you can't really go straight to that model. If I'm going to use a currency, I want to be relatively assured that someone else somewhere is going to want it. At first, it's because they were literally "bank notes" and you could use them to get gold out of the bank. Once banks start making loans and mortgages in a currency, and there's legal repercussions for not repaying a debt, then you c

        • I don't think you're totally wrong.... and this is why I've really never played with crypto beyond mining some, a few years back, when that was still economically viable with off the shelf PC hardware.

          But the perceived value in crypto was supposed to be the idea it can exist in the "void" of no central bank or government controlling it. When you print up pieces of paper and claim they have value as currency -- you're talking about a process that is relatively inexpensive. (Sure, the printing presses at a m

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by RobinH ( 124750 )
            I get it, but I think the control by the central banks and such isn't as big of a problem as people think. Mostly I say that because anyone with any significant amount of wealth doesn't store it in currency - they store it in assets... whether that's stocks, commodities, etc. Sure, some actually invest in bonds or t-bills, and that's a form of currency because it's a promissory note, but the vast majority of wealth is held in the form of assets. If I own 0.0003% of Company X, or a few hundred tons of cop

      • We could have been using that energy for protein folding, seti at home, etc. Use power cycles to do something USEFUL. But no, dangle a dollar and sound high-tech and apparently that's how you get people these days.

        You don't get to decide for me what my CPU and GPU cycles are to be used for. This isn't communist China.

    • Crypto money is cancer.
      Proof of stake is insecure BS.

  • Has everything to do with greedy scammers not wanting to pay for the electricity they're wasting to 'mine' the imaginary worthless nonsense known as 'cryptocurrency', being one of the biggest troll-memes in human history, right up there with organized religion and Reaganomics.

  • Why not use the power plant it to power one of the atmospheric Carbon capture technologies and actually have it do something useful instead of contributing to the heating of the planet?

    Oh wait ... no immediate profit in saving the planet.

    never mind.

  • We need nuclear power plants to do this as well, instead of using coal/nat gas plants.

    THis would be a win-win all the way around.

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