On July 27, in an interview with the national news agency Kabar, the President of Kyrgyzstan Sadyr Japarov revealed that he has greenlit $20 million project of the construction of a cryptocurrency mining farm inside the Kambar-Ata-2 hydroelectric power plant.
Why is it necessary
A hydroelectric power plant uses the energy of flowing or falling water to produce electricity, making it the oldest and most commonly used method of generating electricity. The basic principle of hydroelectric power is the conversion of kinetic energy (energy in motion) from water into electrical energy.
The Kambar-Ata-2 hydroelectric power plant has been operating since 2010, generating a total of 120 MW (megawatt) of electricity per second. However, due to the capacity, only 90 MW are utilized. Over the past 13 years, there have been significant energy losses that, in monetary terms, totaled more than 3 billion som (≈$34,2 million).
To address this inefficiency, the plan is to establish a cryptocurrency mining facility inside the power plant, effectively utilizing the idle 30 MW. This project aims to prevent further energy losses and convert the unused capacity into hashrate.
Bitcoin hashrate refers to the total computational power used for mining. It quantifies the number of hash computations Bitcoin miners perfor per second across the entire network. Hashrate is typically measured in units such as hashes per second (h/s), Kilohashes (Kh/s), Megahashes (Mh/s), Gigahashes (Gh/s), Terahashes (Th/s), or even Petahashes (Ph/s).
What's the profit
One of the most powerful asic miner Bitmain Bitcoin Miner S19j XP consumes up to 3500 watts and outputs 151 TH/s. Under ideal conditions, up to ≈8,500 devices can be connected to this hydroelectric power plant (30MW = 30 million watts; 30 million watts/3500 watts). Thus, the total hashrate will amount to ≈1,3 million TH/s. At the moment, the overall hashrate of the entire Bitcoin network stands at approximately 373 million TH/s.
President Japarov explained the benefits, stating, "Once the mining farm starts working, we will no longer incur such losses. The revenue generated will benefit power engineers or, to be more precise, ordinary people. Every tyiyn, every kWh will be under the supervision of power engineers. The entire process will be automated and under our control”.
A tyiyn is a Kyrgyz exchangeable monetary unit equal to 1/100 of the Kyrgyz som, similar to cents and dollars in other countries.
