Muck for buck
Philip Hughes’s family has farmed the land for generations, but now he is turning his hand to mining, using powerful computers powered by renewable energy to generate cryptocurrencies. but the peculiarity is that the energy used is derived, as Philip said, from “cow muck”. Philip Hughes farm is near the Berwyn mountain range, not far from the Snowdonia National Park, in Denbighshire.
A big 6-cylinder engine running at 500 rpm turns methane given off by decomposing cow manure into electricity. The process is called anaerobic digestion: in the absence of oxygen, microbes break down the manure and produce methane, which can be combusted to produce heat and electricity, instead of entering the atmosphere where it would act as a powerful greenhouse gas. And what’s left over can be used as fertilizer.
About two-thirds of the electricity generated by the anaerobic digester helps power the farm and the farm’s caravan park, but the remainder powers mining rigs, and specialist computers as big as about the size of a suitcase. At the moment, they are mining Ethereum.
The income has been good, but “it does very much depend on what day you ask that question”, Philip says, with a nod to the notorious volatility of this digital product. The value of Ethereum has fallen from over $4,000 in May to about $1,600 at the time of writing this article.
Philip has also started leasing out his renewable energy. The rigs powered by the digester are a mixture of those he owns and others belonging to third parties.
At a cost of about £18,000, each rig is stuffed with “lots of very powerful computer graphics cards”, according to supplier Josh Riddett, who runs Easy Crypto Hunter, in Manchester. And while the energy consumption of Ethereum mining is high, it is significantly less than mining Bitcoin and may yet be reduced further.
Josh has been pitching cryptocurrency mining to small-scale renewable electricity generators for some time, he says his equipment is in 42 sites covering solar, hydro, and wind-powered generators in addition to anaerobic digestion. But some small-scale hydro projects are wary because they worry about the environmental impact of cryptocurrencies. Others doubt cryptocurrencies will be valuable for long, or at least enough to repay the considerable capital investment hydropower requires.
Previously, the main mechanism for developing renewable-energy schemes was the feed-in-tariff, which paid renewable generators for the electricity they fed into the grid. The tariff started in 2011, and a boom in renewables followed, but the amount it pays has declined and closed to new generators in 2019.
“We’re not going to be able to move to green energy unless the government revitalizes the subsidy or we start looking at alternatives”, Josh says.
However, renewable energy used to mine cryptocurrency cannot be used for other purposes, such as powering electric cars or heating homes.
The decline of heavy industry has left some parts of the US with a surplus of hydroelectric power, and the resulting cheap electricity has attracted cryptocurrency miners, but communities that have experienced a “gold rush” of this practice have found it a mixed blessing due to the pushing up of electricity prices. And some, such as Plattsburg, have temporarily banned crypto mining.
The worries are also about the limited lifespan of mining equipment, which can rapidly become obsolete, creating an e-waste problem. And rather than switching to renewables, many say it would be better to make cryptocurrencies more efficient or stop using them altogether.
The Anaerobic Digestion and Bioresources Association says only a “small handful of plants” are exploring crypto mining in the UK. Philip is very aware that his cryptocurrency business is based upon producing an asset whose value can change dramatically, sometimes in response to a single remark by Elon Musk or Donald Trump. If the market collapses, he says, he will put the computing power of the rigs to other uses.
But some seem more speculative than others, such as setting the boxes of graphic cards to work for rendering computer animation for filmmakers such as Disney. However, his venture into crypto has sparked interest. Other farmers interested in the project have called him. And it is “a lot easier to run a computer, than a herd of cows or a flock of sheep”, he said.
Source bbc.com
