The facility, named Nautilus Cryptomine, will be able to power 16,000 mining rigs. TeraWulf wants to reduce the negative impact of itcoin">Bitcoin mining on the environment by using clean energy.
To achieve this, the company will generate all the power needed to run the facility from a 2.5-gigawatt nuclear plant on-site. The Nautilus Cryptomine Facility was launched on March 6th, 2023, and it is the first of its kind in the United States.
TeraWulf announced in August 2021 that it would build a new mining facility called Nautilus Cryptomine. The project is a partnership with a company called Talen Energy Corporation, which is based in Texas.
The first phase of the Nautilus Cryptomine is built on Talen’s digital infrastructure campus and is powered by a nuclear generation station. This means that the facility will get its energy on-site instead of using the grid.
The Nautilus Cryptomine is currently 180 megawatts (MW), but it is expected to reach 300 MW once it is fully completed. This will make it one of the largest mining facilities in the region.
TeraWulf signed a power agreement for five years, which means that it will pay $0.02 per kilowatt hour (kWh) for energy. This is much lower than the average cost of energy for industrial use in the United States, which is $0.09/kWh. Across its two facilities, TeraWulf’s energy costs will average out to $0.04/kWh.
TeraWulf released a statement saying that they want to have a total of 50,000 miners online and provide around 5.5 ExaHashes per second (EH/s) across their two sites by early Q2, 2023. They estimate that they will need 160 MW of power to do this.
Right now, the Nautilus facility is using 8,000 mining rigs and has a hash rate capacity of about 1.0 EH/s. TeraWulf plans to power up another 8,000 rigs by May to increase the hash rate capacity to 1.9 EH/s. They also mentioned that they might add 50 MW of bitcoin mining capacity to the Nautilus facility in the future.
On November 22, 2022, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law that stops fossil fuel-powered Proof of Work (PoW) mining for two years, which makes New York the first U.S. state to do so.
On February 25, 2023, itcoin">Bitcoin’s mining difficulty reached an all-time high of 43.5 Trillion, while itcoin">Bitcoin’s hash rate difficulty is currently at 356.47 EH.
It’s important to care about the environmental impact of bitcoin mining as the network’s high mining difficulty and hash rates show there is still a high demand for bitcoins. Many are calling for mining to shift to more eco-friendly methods, making TeraWulf’s commitment to a 100% zero-carbon, energy-powered mining facility an important example to follow.
