The owner of a small hydroelectric power station in Costa Rica has set up a mining farm on its territory to launch a 30-year venture after months of downtime. Reuters.
During the pandemic, the government reduced purchases of electricity due to its surplus in a country where the state has a monopoly on energy distribution.
“We had to stop activities for nine months, and exactly a year ago I heard about bitcoin, blockchain and digital mining,” explained the owner of the hydroelectric power station, Eduardo Cooper.
According to him, initially he was skeptical, but he was convinced that the cryptocurrency mining business consumes a lot of energy, which there was a surplus.
Cooper’s company, which operates three power plants worth $ 13.5 million and a total capacity of 3 MW, invested $ 500,000 in the construction of a mining farm.
More than 650 installations for mining cryptocurrencies from 150 clients are installed in eight containers located at the Data Center CR facility.
One of them told the publication that he took up home mining in 2021 with equipment worth $ 7,000. But placing it at a river power plant turned out to be much more profitable due to almost half the energy tariffs.
According to Cooper, the government should be more aggressive in attracting miners to the country. Industry representatives around the world are looking for cheap green electricity and stable internet connections, which Costa Rica has in abundance, he said.
So far, all customers at Data Center CR are local.
We will remind, earlier the authorities of another Central American country, El Salvador, announced plans to attract miners for the extraction of cryptocurrencies on the environmentally friendly energy of volcanoes.
In October 2021, El Salvador began mining bitcoin at the geothermal power plant of the state-owned company LaGeo. According to media, the facility has 300 devices.
Experts expressed doubts about both the economic efficiency of this method of generating electricity and its environmental friendliness.
