Blocktime

Episode 24: Powering the Largest Bitcoin Mining Facility with Nick Kyle

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Join us for Episode 24 for an electrifying conversation with Nick Kyle,  Electrician at Riot. As we power down our discussion, Nick sheds light on some common misconceptions about mining's electrical demands and its impact on the grid, particularly in the context of voltage ride through during weather events. We also touch on the community-driven aspect of mining, from the shared experiences with family members in the industry to the team-building escapades that unite us beyond the clock. With an eye toward the future, we emphasize the importance of weatherization, risk management, and the resilience of mining operations in the face of Mother Nature's unpredictability.  

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Block Time podcast produced by Riot Platforms, where we take a deep dive into topics relating to Bitcoin, bitcoin mining, and electricity and energy. Today we've got a really special guest, nick Kyle, one of our electricians in Rockdale. Welcome, nick, to the show. Thanks, beard.

Speaker 2:

Great to be here.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you know, when I think about Bitcoin mining and I think when a lot of people think about Bitcoin mining, they think about the energy intensity, so it very much is aligned with kind of the electrical system and it's in my mind it is one of several services that we have to provide to the mining rig for it to be happy and hashing in addition to cooling and you know that environmental consideration.

Speaker 1:

But the electricity side is absolutely fascinating because I came into this industry with basically zero background in electricity and learning from you and your team has just been a tremendous experience. So I wanted to have you on the show kind of share some of the things you've learned and also kind of get some human background of who is Nick and kind of your history and how you ended up at Riot. So let's start with kind of your education how you know, how did you learn to become an electrician?

Speaker 2:

So actually, funny enough, before I came to Riot all I had done was more of framing and house construction and never really got to dabble into electricity. I wasn't very fond of it actually. But coming to Riot I had no expectations of you know what I would be doing. I just wanted to be in this industry and I was literally digging a ditch one day to run some wires and I was working for Data Center. Because I started on Data Center and Cameron needed help building these PDUs for our immersion building F and he came. Hey, he sent somebody to come get me and since that day I have been working in the electrical department.

Speaker 1:

Fantastic, all right. So framing is quite a difficult role. I had my house built, I think, like four years ago, and I remember they were like okay, the framers are going to move fastest, they're going to get the whole thing up. I think it was in a matter of weeks, even though building the house took, you know, a year. So that must have been pretty demanding. Why is it that you didn't like electricity at the time?

Speaker 2:

Well, so in the framing world there's a very controversial relationship between framers, electricians, plumbers, and it was really more of the culture of we all hated each other. And so in my mind I had always just wanted to do framing. I never really wanted to dabble into electricity because it just seemed scary at the time. You know, I didn't want to get electrocuted, I didn't want to get blown up in case I had messed up, Because if you mess up a stud in a wall, you just take it out and put it back. No harm, no foul, but an electrical, if you mess up, you're potentially hurting you or somebody else or quite possibly burning a house down. So you know, that kind of deterred me away from it until I got to ride and realize, you know, oh my gosh, I'm literally missing out on so many good opportunities that I could have grasped upon prior to this if I had only known.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I think that one of the mysteries of electricity is that it's kind of hidden, like you can't just like look at it and be like, oh, that's a live wire. But whereas with plumbing it's like, well, there's water coming out of it, right, it's a lot more tangible.

Speaker 3:

On the way up here, me and Nick were talking. We got to ride together from the Rockdale site and we were talking, like I can get myself around some, you know, garage type stuff, I can do a break job, I can do a coolant flush and oil change, but when it comes to wiring and electricity it's silent. You don't hear it, you don't smell it, like you can't see it. So that, to me, is one of those things that I probably haven't, you know, dove into very, you know very much either.

Speaker 1:

And then you have the, you know, in the movie where they're trying to diffuse the bomb and they're like cut the green wire, and there's like six green wires and you're like which?

Speaker 3:

one Like the, you know like, oh, it is one of those things.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's like you're going to have two wires. It's like black and red, and then you go out to the site and it's like it's actually yellow and brown. Yeah, it's like okay.

Speaker 2:

Well, here we go, yeah yeah, that's typically how it goes, honestly.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and like you mentioned, pierre, electricity in our industry is just so important, so vital, and it has to be exactly right and we're dealing with a lot of it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, an industrial scale level of it. And so you know, when we think about high voltage, right, so we've, we are in Rockdale, we're at the Sandow switch, so we have I think it's 138 kV coming in and then that goes into our substation and that goes to 13.8.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, Step down to 13.8. And then after that it goes to our transformers, gets turned into 416 technically, and then that is fed to our switch gears and then on to our miners as single phase into the building onto our miners.

Speaker 1:

And that you mentioned the PDUs. Those sit between the switch and the mining rig.

Speaker 2:

Yes, yes, sir, that sits between the switch gear and the mining rig.

Speaker 1:

So you started out helping Cameron wire together those PDUs for the immersion building right.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we were actually doing basically a quality control check just to make sure that these were coming in properly and we, you know, had to actually help the manufacturer at some points get them done, because our site, as you know, is very, very demanding it's a very large site and we're one of the biggest in immersion cooling and so we had to actually help the manufacturer that was doing them, complete them at some points, and we were also in charge of getting them up, wired together, testing them, making sure they had the right voltage. Everything was working properly it was. It was a very big job for me, stepping into electrical for the first time ever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and the PDUs sit on top of the tank. They're kind of elevated. That make it an additional challenge as well.

Speaker 2:

Very much so. Having to build up the upper body strength to get them up there, standing on the tanks or standing on a ladder to try to wire them in together, it was. It was a very big challenge, very sore after all of that.

Speaker 1:

So I think that if we advertised our job roles as like more of like a CrossFit gym where you come and get your exercise, like we could charge people to work.

Speaker 2:

We could.

Speaker 1:

We could. So that's fascinating, and did you feel like it was pretty easy to pick up as, as you were kind of making that transition?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So I I'm typically one of those people that if it's hands on, I pick it up really quick, yeah, and so this was very hands on. It was throw you into the water, you got to swim, kind of thing. So I did pick it up a little quicker than I anticipated I would, which was great for me and great for everybody else. But it was a bit of a challenge at first to kind of wrap my head around what these PDUs are doing. You know what the minor is doing and all that stuff.

Speaker 1:

It's one of my favorite things about right is the number of people who have been able to advance their career here and find opportunities for for growth. So that's awesome to hear. And the now what kind of tools are you working with when you're working on the PDUs?

Speaker 2:

So typically you're just using crimpers, strippers, a Phillips head screwdriver. It's actually a lot more simple than what I thought it was going to be, but they work great. The tools that we started with were kind of like community tools and we had grown. Actually it's really funny, me and Blake, the other electrician I work with we had grown to actually really enjoy using those tools and then when they bought us new ones to better ones really to use, we were just like, well, we had perfectly fine tools, but you know, the tools that we use are actually pretty simple just to get the job done. It's a lot more simple than you know the average person with things.

Speaker 1:

The challenge is to know where to wire things up Right.

Speaker 2:

Right To know. You know, because we have what we call neutral jumpers and neutral mains to know which receptacle every neutral man needs to land on, make sure it's there. You know it was a bit of a challenge to get that wrapped around in my head personally.

Speaker 3:

Nick, I got a quick question for you. You know you said that you came from the background of framing and not knowing much about the electrical side of stuff. But sitting here today and listening to you talk, it sounds like you have a pretty good understanding of all the different stuff that goes into the electrical components that we're talking about. How long did it take for you to get comfortable learning all that stuff, and what was that process like?

Speaker 2:

It. I would say it probably took me close to eight to nine months to really wrap my head around what's going on and why it's going on, because that's the most important part is why this electricity is doing what it's doing. But if, if, honestly, if it weren't for my amazing supervisor, cameron, I would not be as knowledgeable as I am today, because he had he did work really hard to make sure that we understood exactly what we were doing and why we're doing it.

Speaker 1:

Cameron is very generous with his knowledge. I love asking him questions and you know he'll start drawing a diagram right away and clear things up.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, he will make sure you understand it before you leave.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so now the. So the electricity goes to the mining rigs, but there's also other systems within the facility that the electricity is going into On the on the immersion, there's the pumps and the dry coolers. How is that different than what goes into the on the mining rig side?

Speaker 2:

So it really, it really doesn't get any different. What I will say is that our pumps use all three phases of our electrical that's coming into the building, rather than our miners use a single phase each, and our dry coolers are also three phase. They have fans on top of them, so, and that's to help keep everything cool, keep the lines in the water cool, but the power itself really doesn't differentiate, besides the pumps. Funny enough, the pumps and the dry coolers that cool the miners use a lot less electricity than the actual miners themselves do. That's interesting.

Speaker 1:

I think when, when people are shopping for a mining rig, sometimes they don't know, like, what the difference is between single phase and three phase. Do you want to explain that, that piece of the policy that we're going to be talking about, that, that piece of the puzzle?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so single phase will be. So I'll start here. Every, every place is fed either single phase or three phase, and for an industrial site like us we are fed all three phases. The average place is only fed a single phase, but for us the difference is we use our three phase to get as much electricity to the miners as possible and because we also use pumps to cool a lot of different things. I mean, even our air cooled buildings have pumps on them. But the really only difference is is just the application.

Speaker 1:

Right.

Speaker 2:

Just the application.

Speaker 1:

That makes sense and when, when, when you're kind of thinking about the maintenance and the construction of the system. You know Rockdale is, from a construction perspective, somewhat complete. I know that there's other, you know there's projects still going on and I don't know if you've had a chance to visit the course of Kanna site yet. But that is you know very much a construction project in in in Norx, with your framing background, like when you look at the sprung structures, like what do you make of that structure that we have in Rockdale?

Speaker 2:

I think, I think there are great buildings for what we are using them for.

Speaker 2:

They're definitely probably the better option for for us because of how quick we want things to go so that we can start making as much money as possible. The those buildings do do fairly well for our miners right now. I think they're probably in the future will be better options, but those buildings are definitely definitely different. I've never really seen a tent style building that rigid and that big before. I've only ever seen them in smaller scales. So those buildings to me are amazing yeah.

Speaker 1:

There's. There's always like an opportunity for something innovative to happen in this industry, like at every level, from the mining rig to to the actual building. And yeah, in the context of when those were built and it was like around COVID, it was like harder to get the right metals to, you know, build a metal structure.

Speaker 3:

So yeah, it's a, it's a fascinating differentiator Sometimes when I'm in there I forget that it is a tent structure, like. It just seems like such a solid building that you kind of forget that this is like a canvas style building. But yeah, it's funny to me because those buildings during the winter stay a really comfortable temperature and then during the summer obviously with the ambient heat it gets warm in there, but it's never. It's just interesting because it's an insulated tent structure and it's solid. You know, you don't get any drafts or anything like that and the ventilation is pretty decent for what it is Right.

Speaker 1:

You'd mentioned the dangers of electricity. How does your team approach kind of the safety aspect of the role?

Speaker 2:

So the way we view our safety out there, if we can't do it without getting hurt, it won't get done. For that moment. Now, with everybody else, like anybody that's not in our department, we are very, very, very cautious because, you know, anything out there can happen at any moment. This, this, what we're doing with our electrical equipment, really hasn't been done Very much, so there's not really a a rapport for it, you know. So we, we like to try to take the extra step of consciousness just to be on the safe side. Like we will have everybody move away from the miners when we go to turn a system on or off. You know we, we always try to take just a little extra step just to be sure that we're doing this as safe as possible. That so much so that it doesn't, you know, hinder us from the safety, so much so that it doesn't, you know, hinder our work and the production that we have going on.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that makes sense. And then I imagine you also have you know tools to to identify, kind of, where the electricity is.

Speaker 2:

Right. So we do have what we call non-contact testers. We have some that are for low levels of electricity and we also have some that are for very high levels of electricity. I mean the average one. You'll see just about almost anybody walking around with any electricity or even minor maintenance. Actually, I think I have it Is this guy?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, this guy right here can save your life. You turn it on and it'll beep whenever you touch anything that's hot and it also has ranges from 12 to a thousand and then from 70 to a thousand, and this thing has saved me many, many of times out there Because, like y'all said, you know, you look, you look at a wire. You don't know that that's hot. I mean, you can, obviously in the emergency buildings, you can look down at the miners and see, oh yeah, they're on Right. But sometimes you know you don't look at the miners, you're going up to fix a problem and the first thing in your head is to oh, I should test this. And we have a little saying that we like to say in our department trust nothing, test everything.

Speaker 1:

I love that. I mean that's so aligned with the Bitcoin ethos. Don't trust, verify is kind of the the famous meme tagline, I guess we'll call it, and it really because yeah, I won't, I won't say the assumptions line. You know what assumptions do, but it's pervasive throughout society, right, the people have kind of sometimes gotten lulled into a false sense of safety that hey, somebody else is looking out for my safety, so I don't need to, and that that doesn't really match with reality.

Speaker 2:

No, no, not at all, especially you know being out there, and even even data center people will tell you, you know, they always try to find somebody to test something. Even if they look at the miner and the miners says it's off, they'll still come find one of us to come and make sure that this is off so that they know that they're working safely. And See, I like that's. That's the thing that I think I like the most about being out there. The safety culture, yeah, out there is just amazing is you know, everybody tries to do their best with making sure every job that's being done out there is being done as safe as possible and that's just that's awesome. And a lot of places I've worked that's never been a really big thing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I mean, I think from from rides culture perspective, like we do Emphasize the importance of people right at the end of the day. Yes, we have a hundred thousand mining rings, but the only way that they are turned on is if we have great people who are doing things safely, you know, and competently and with a sense of urgency, but first and foremost, safely right.

Speaker 2:

I think the thing that I've been saying here lately is it always takes a village yeah, it takes a village to do everything we're doing out there. And it's every department. Every department puts in all of their strength to get everything done that we do out there. And then, you know, a lot of people Give us electricians praise, but Without y'all this wouldn't be getting done. All we do is turn it on. Everybody else puts the miners in, hooks them up, make sure they're in the right pools, make sure they're operating properly. All we do is just turn them on.

Speaker 3:

I think you're. You got a lot of Responsibility beyond just turning them on. But I wanted to go back to you said you mentioned that it takes a village. How many people are on y'alls Department or on y'alls crew and? And are y'all 24, 7 like?

Speaker 2:

I kind of know the answer to that, but I wanted you to explain it so, if I'm not mistaken, I think we have either 13 or 14 people on on our department and we did just transit transition over to be in 24 7. So we do have night shift now out there Just keeping an eye on everything, making sure there's nothing that's gonna hurt anybody, just doing basically a safety walk-through, repairs, stuff like that and part of that is also the procedures that you'll have in place as far as, like lockout, tag-out kind of stuff.

Speaker 3:

So when y'all are servicing something, the only people who are allowed to work on that electrical piece of equipment is the electricians, correct, yes, correct, correct, cool.

Speaker 2:

We do have a lockout tag-out procedure. When we switch off the breakers and the 4,000 amp gears, we'll lock them out and a lot of times we'll put what we call a hasp which has six holes, so six different people can put a lock on it, so that Everybody has to have their lock off for that to get turned back on got you yeah, it's in Bitcoin.

Speaker 1:

We call that multi-sig. You've got a? Yeah, have multiple signers.

Speaker 3:

It's funny how a lot of like the Bitcoin protocol relates to how you know a fully functioning corporate or corporate, but like a industrial scale, you know plant like this works. There's a lot of parallels to that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and and people will will criticize Bitcoin of oh, it's so hard to use. And it's like, yeah, but you're you're using the monetary system At an industrial level. You know it's like it's it's not your, your home. You know, plug right that you're plugging in, but it comes with its risk as well. Like in Bitcoin, it's like, hey, if you send your Bitcoin to someone, you can't just get it back. Right, so an electricity. If you shock yourself like you can't just undo that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, you cannot just undo that, yeah it requires a lot of, you know, big picture thinking yeah, because the consequences are dire, exactly yeah.

Speaker 1:

So you mentioned breakers. What is a breaker?

Speaker 2:

So a breaker is what allows the electricity to pass from the initial 4000 amp breaker To the minor rig. So that is our Our quickest means of shutting off all the miners and probably one of the safer means of shutting off all the miners, that those breakers also protect the miners. If there is a hard ground fault, they should trip. Or if the system is getting like the gear itself is getting too hot, they will also trip. And that is just to protect themselves and the miners.

Speaker 1:

That makes sense. So it's you know when, when, when somebody has to go in their garage and Flip that switch because they overloaded it, or something right same concept.

Speaker 2:

It's like when your wife is using the hairdryer and you're trying to microwave breakfast at the same time.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I have that issue with my microwave and my air fryer. If I ever put those two on at the same time, it, without fail, trips to breaker and I got to go take a trip to the garage. So now I know that I can't use both at the same time. Speaking of microwave and electricity and stuff like that, any time that you know I'm talking to somebody who's not familiar with Bitcoin, or mining in for that matter, I always try to explain to them exactly how much electricity each miner uses. What is the equivalent to what one miner uses as far as microwaves go. How how many microwaves are per miner? Oh, that's a good one.

Speaker 2:

If I had to guess without doing any math, I'd probably say Around Three to four, maybe even five for some miners. Yeah, depending on the model of miner.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, depending obviously on how, what, like, what wattage your microwave is running at. But like, say, a thousand watt microwave, which is pretty easy to you know it'd be about four of those put together.

Speaker 2:

Isn't that crazy how we have that's wild what what is the?

Speaker 3:

the latest number like a hundred and twelve thousand miners deployed and you multiply that by four microwaves, that's what four hundred and fifty thousand microwaves running at the same time. That's crazy. That is a lot, yeah, a lot of electricity going through that, that, that facility.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I remember one of them, one of our critics, was talking about the Last summer, you know, when we were selling electricity. They were like, oh, I should have a facility with you know 500,000 microwaves. Just run those and then I'll turn them off to, you know, benefit from demand response curtailment, and it's like what? What they're missing there is that the microwave.

Speaker 3:

You know, yes, it'll reheat your hot pocket, but that's, it's not saving the monetary financial system of the entire world. Right, exactly utility for running 500,000 microwaves.

Speaker 1:

No no, not 24-7.

Speaker 3:

No but Bitcoin mining there's. There's a significant reason for that. Yeah that's cool. And then then also the other argument of like how many swimming pools of water does Bitcoin mining take? Well, how many swimming pools of water does swimming pools take?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and also Were you going to swim in Alcoa Lake?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, would not recommend it.

Speaker 1:

Cool, maybe some catch and release fishing out there release heavy, heavy release.

Speaker 2:

I wish they would let people do that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, well, maybe we'll make it one day. Well, I'm curious. So, what are your hobbies outside orc?

Speaker 2:

So I do quite a bit of golfing. I do like to spend time with family for the most part, but golfing and playing games really, man yeah.

Speaker 1:

We have a new tradition at right of going golfing on the first Thursday every month. Yeah, we were actually on the same team one time.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, how did y'all do, did y'all win that scramble I?

Speaker 1:

Don't think we did. You have to have Tom on your team To win that one.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I enjoyed that too, and my first time playing was with a Tom and Thomas Betchen.

Speaker 1:

They did. Did they knock that out of the park?

Speaker 2:

I think we came in second that time. Yeah, I think we did come in second. Tom is a. He's a pretty good golfer. Yes, I will give him that. I think he did like golfing in high school or college or something he's he's pretty good golfer.

Speaker 3:

We mentioned family. Nick, I know you have some family who are in the industry. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Speaker 2:

Oh, yeah, sure, so I do have my wife. She does work out at our site, Riot. She is a minor mainist personnel. My little brother, he just got hired on here recently. He works for data center, and then my wife's father and brother also work in the same industry.

Speaker 2:

And you know, I think it's crazy to think about, but you know, basically that whole side of my family is in this industry and I actually found out about this industry from my father-in-law and brother-in-law and ended up working for a another site, another industrial site, just like, kind of like ours. And then I found out, you know, about Riot and I actually quit my job and it took me I want to say it took me about a week or two to figure out, because y'all didn't have any postings at the time. And it took me about a week or two to figure out how to get hired on at Riot. And I had met Heath somewhere, I don't know where, I can't remember where I met him, but I met Heath somewhere and he had told me yeah, go to workforce, know, get you started. And so I did that and you know, here I am today, two years and two months later. That's awesome.

Speaker 3:

Wait, when is your hire date, Nick?

Speaker 2:

My hire date was November 23rd of 21.

Speaker 3:

21,. I believe Mine is November 1st of 21. Wow, so that's funny. Wow, I didn't realize we were that close together getting hired on at Riot, that Cameron got hired on the month previous to that.

Speaker 2:

Wow On like the 21st of that month.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I always mentioned to people when I first got hired at the end of 21, it was like five people in the office, maybe six or seven, right and now we have went from that first three-plex office to a 12-plex, literally quadrupled the size of our office and it's full now. So it's incredible to see the pace of growth at Riot within, whether it be, you know, accountants and administration and anything else, to electricians, to custodial, to security, everything has grown exponentially over the years, the two years that I've been there.

Speaker 2:

The pace at our company is unbelievable because you know, coming from my background, you know the pace that we had in my background was fast, but I've never seen such a big scale grown so fast as Riot has. As I mean, when I started, building F had just been completed like the building itself.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, just the building.

Speaker 2:

And we were. They were starting to do all the tanks and putting all the switch gears up, and then I got to watch G completely.

Speaker 3:

In.

Speaker 2:

D&E and D&E. Yeah, and it is just unbelievable the pace that we operate at out there in our site and how well it operates for that pace.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for the complexity and the amount of work that has to go into there and to be able to do all of it. It's pretty nuts in the timeframe. It takes a village of people who are engineers, people who are draft and design electricians who actually can follow you know those designs and implement them, and it's pretty crazy.

Speaker 1:

And then I get into conversations with people where they say Bitcoin mining does not employ anyone. You know, it's just like computers doing their thing and I'm like it employs whole families.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, literally, yeah, literally.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's an absurd assertion, and we're hiring lots more people in Corsicana as well as we speak.

Speaker 3:

And I think the highlight for that is that it's all rural communities at this point, right Like we're not putting a mining facility in the heart of Austin. Yeah, we're going to close to Austin in an hour and some change away, but at the end of the day we're in the community of Rockdale, mylam County, and so you're hiring people in those local small communities and whole families at that, you know.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I'll say like, oh, you know, we're hiring 100 people, for example, and they're like, oh, that's not a lot, you know, Texas has this many million. It's like, yeah, but Rockdale for. Rockdale that's like a sizable percentage, like we're the biggest employer now.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah. And Nick, what is it like having so much family at the site? You get to run into them pretty often.

Speaker 2:

Actually, believe it or not our site's so big I really don't run into them that often. The only time I run into them it's like on lunch and sometimes on a break here and there. But for me, I'm fairly all over the place when it comes to being at work. And you know, yeah, electricians are needed in every area. And you know, I'm one of the electricians that carries a radio, because we don't have very many electricians that carry a radio. So I'm being called to building, to building, to building, to check on this. Look at this, Something smells funny over here. You know, yeah, Stuff like that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I feel like a lot of the facility and a lot of the teams rely on just calling, checking in with the electricians make sure this is right, make sure everything is running well, just to be on the safe side of stuff. And that's why we don't have any major issues or a lot of major issues. As far as you know, stuff blowing up or people getting electrocuted it's because the electricians are there to take care of that stuff, right.

Speaker 1:

I'm very grateful and thank you and your team were available to help me on my project of voltage ride-through testing. So I know in a previous episode we talked about voltage ride-through and what we're doing at in Rockdale is setting up kind of a test area, a laboratory, to experiment on what can the mining rigs ride through from the point of view of voltage disturbances? And we see voltage disturbances happen on the grid due to the amount of transmission that's going on. There's just so much longer and longer distances of transmission Creates, you know, lower power quality, more opportunities for voltage disturbances. On top of that, when we look at the development of renewables, inverter-based resources like solar and wind, also vulnerable to these voltage disturbances. And so what we're currently testing for is you know how do the mining rigs fare in this? And to set this test up I could not have done it on my own because we've got 480 volt coming in. The testing machine is 240 volt, so already I needed a transformer to stuff it down. I don't have one of those, yeah right.

Speaker 1:

But your team did and y'all got that set up so quickly and, on top of that, wired it to the test tank to just make it so simple, you know, for someone like me to use it. So hugely grateful for the work there and, yeah, it's just something I would not have been able to do.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we try to make everything as simple as possible and as neat as possible, and that actual test was quite surprising to me, that you know we're actually looking at trying to do something about that now, now that it has become a bit of an issue with our miners some of them and I think we're actually going to I think we'll be able to get some really, really good evidence as to, you know, can these miners handle this long of a pause from electricity? Can they handle just a little bit? What are they going to do? And I think the ideas that you've come up with for that is amazing. Now, when it comes to the blips in electricity that part for me, I would have honestly never thought that that would have affected a miner like that and which was really surprising for me, that you know. Just, you know, two seconds of a disturbance can cause so many different things to happen out there, and I don't think a lot of people realize that when it comes to, like, our industry and what we do out, you know, when we're mining and stuff like that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and you know, when I started learning about electricity, something I found surprising was On one hand, it's very mathematical, it's very logical. On the other hand, there's a lot of plus or minus 10 percent. It's rated for this, but you actually use it at that. You know, there's kind of some some fuzzy things that you've got to negotiate with.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's definitely. I won't say it's a guess game, but sometimes you just have to try it out and figure it out to see if it's going to work, because even though it says it says it's good on paper, it still might not.

Speaker 1:

Don't trust verify that's right.

Speaker 2:

Trust you, gotta run the numbers, test everything.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so are different models of miners affected, of you know voltage ride through. Do they have a big difference?

Speaker 1:

We will let the data guide us, but we don't yet have the data yet. So we're trying to answer that exact question.

Speaker 3:

That's the whole reason behind this. Yes, yes.

Speaker 1:

After we're done recording this podcast, I'll be driving back out to Rockdale. In the field, don't work data gathering.

Speaker 3:

And what's it like for you, pierre? I know that you know a lot of your time is spent in meetings and stuff like that. You know higher level stuff and you don't get to spend too much time in the field. But how has that experience been for you, working with the Electrical Electrical Department?

Speaker 1:

Oh, fantastic. I mean, I think that when I came to Cameron with, like, what I had in mind, it immediately clicked for him and he was like, all right, here's what you know he's. He got into problem solving mode. And I like problem solving mode for, you know, people I'm working with. What I don't like is problem finding mode of hey, this isn't going to work, but then not really trying to find a solution. They're just, you know, at and Rockdale, it's the opposite. It's we're going to find a solution, we're going to make this work. And, you know, even finding a transformer like hey, we, we happen to have one on inventory, because you know, of course, we have one, and also the sense of urgency, like it just got knocked out really quickly. So I've I've enjoyed that a lot and you know, I think the only challenge is the distance, right that I live in Austin. It is, you know, an hour and a half away, but yeah, it got me thinking, huh, maybe I need to get a place out here.

Speaker 3:

There you go.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, have a little getaway in the country Exactly Get some horses, get some cattle, you know, and that's the other thing is, I do like the rural context in which we operate.

Speaker 1:

So I think, though, that what really what motivates me on this issue is that my concern is that people are going to use voltage ride through to attack our industry in a way that is not guided by data and electrical engineering, but is rather guided by their political agenda of not liking Bitcoin.

Speaker 1:

So now that they don't like Bitcoin, oh well, now voltage ride through is like oh, we're damaging the grid somehow, even though we're no different than a solar panel or a wind generator as an inverter based resource, you know facing the same kind of grid challenges. So I think that getting getting the data and seeing, you know, putting putting the criticisms in a real context rather than kind of in a narrative, is critical, and the other part to it as well is hey, let's, let's find solutions, right? So if voltage ride through is a real problem, let's get to the root cause and find ways to solve the problem from an engineering perspective. That way, we can continue to provide really what I see as a very important service to the grid. It would be a shame if you know that people were like oh, voltage ride through, we can't have Bitcoin miners on the grid. It's like OK, look, anything you connect to the grid is going to have positive aspects of it and negative aspects. No pun intended.

Speaker 1:

But, you know, and so we just have to have the right electrical engineering to make it reliable and safe and economical.

Speaker 3:

Cool. I want to bring up real quick and we don't have to include this. We don't need to, but we have some inclement weather forecasted for this next coming week. Does the electrical department have anything that they're doing specifically to kind of prepare for that?

Speaker 2:

Yes. So we have kind of devised a plan because you know we may have to shut some of our stuff down so that we can give some power back to the grid to help everybody out with, you know, cranking up the heaters during this time. So we do have a plan devised for that to try to To try to mitigate how long it would take us to get that done, because typically when we do curtailments like that, it can take a little bit of time for everybody to get where they need to be and get everything shut off, make sure everything is shut off. But I think we do have a pretty solid plan for that Cool.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think you know one of the challenges we've seen in past cold events is the dry coolers freezing and kind of bursting some pipes. So to mitigate that this time around, they've put glycol in the system. Glycol is like antifreeze, so it'll prevent that outcome from happening and if it doesn't, then we'll cut this out of the episode. Absolutely yeah. And in addition, we kind of to your point about curtailment of hey, let's reduce our electricity consumption. We want to do that and we also want to kind of keep the system warm, and so it's not like we're curtailing 100% because that would not be safe, right? So we just got to make sure that we're keeping things warm.

Speaker 3:

A significant majority curtailed, but enough to keep the systems warm, enough to keep you know everything from freezing over.

Speaker 2:

It'll definitely be mainly our air cooled buildings. We definitely don't want to shut down our immersion buildings for that very reason of you know, we want to keep the water going, the water at least somewhat warm, circulating the things yeah even though it does have glycol in it. I know I know both of you know our site gets very windy, especially during this time of year, so that's a big factor that we're trying to put in play when it comes to that as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, risk management weatherization and I think that you know, when we look at what happened with Winter Storm Urie a few years ago, a lot of the problems that caused that outcome of black outs have been addressed of, you know, natural gas pipelines being weatherized, being added to critical infrastructure lists so that they don't get turned off at the worst time.

Speaker 3:

Limbs being trimmed away from trees, yeah, exactly. Like that was a big one. It's just iced over limbs, falling onto power lines and cutting off entire neighborhoods.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so I think that everyone learned from that extreme weather and so, going into Sunday evening, monday next week or when this episode gets released, we'll be looking back and you know with a sigh of relief that everything went well. So, yes, always new learning opportunities as we operate at an industrial scale. All right, thanks, nick, for coming on today. This was a fascinating conversation. I hope our audience also found it very interesting. On the electrical side, we're going to have to do I think we're going to have to do more electrical episodes cover what voltages, what amps are current you know, Electricity 101.

Speaker 3:

I could use that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and yeah, we'll sorry. Yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll be back next week with another guest, or just me solo, because maybe we're going to talk about the ETFs that have been released. I know that's been a big news item, and thanks, gabe, for producing the show and chiming in as well. Oh, yeah, always happy to do it. All right, we'll see you all next week. Don't forget to subscribe and share the podcast with your friends. Bye.

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Pierre Rochard

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