Industrial BTC Mining Brings Life Into Small Texan Town: Report

The Industrial BTC mining facility in the small Texas town of Rockdale is going to bring life in this small town and a better life standard for its residents. At least, that’s what the reports show so let’s find out more in today’s Bitcoin news.

There are two major Bitcoin mining companies that are looking for cheaper electricity in the small town of Texas and both BitDeer and Riot Blockchain are operating their data centers hosted at a former aluminum smelting facility in the Texas town of Rockdale. The town’s aluminum smelting plant was the world’s largest plant until the company that ran it started winding up operations back in 2008. According to Lee Bratcher, the president of the Texas Blockchain Council, the energy capacity of the company was wasted from Alcoa’s departure until the miners came back and set up shop.

Despite Rockdale being a small rural town of 5000 people, it still has benefits that many Industrial BTC mining companies are looking like crypto-friendly politicians, a huge plots of land, and hosting the right infrastructure for repurposing with, of course, cheap electricity prices. Rockdale Mayor John King described the relationship between local grid operators like the Electric Reliability Council of Texas and the miners that benefited mutually. He outlined that miners consume electricity power that will otherwise go to waste and they can also shut down the operations in a moment if power is needed somewhere else:

“Miners are committed to buying a certain amount of power and what they do is they sell it back at market [value] and make a profit. They have a contract of two cents or three cents…and they can sell it for $9 a kilowatt-hour.”

Riot has tripled its BTC production this year and now the company estimates that the facility is producing more than 500 BTC per month from the facility in the small town. At current prices, the mined coins equate to $30 million per month with 100,000 mining rigs. The Texan lawmakers are pushing for even deeper expansion in the state’s BTC mining embrace with senator Ted Cruz saying that mining is a means to capture natural gas that the state now flares with. Cruz even argued that the natural gas is being flared in West Texas because there’s no transmission equipment to get the natural gas to where it should be and be ordinarily employed:

“Use that power to mine Bitcoin. Part of the beauty of that is the instant you’re doing it you’re helping the environment enormously because rather than flaring the natural gas you’re putting it to productive use.”

Source: https://www.dcforecasts.com/bitcoin-news/industrial-btc-mining-brings-life-into-small-texan-town-report/