- Bitcoin is one of the most exciting
and fascinating technologies,
but it has this detrimental side effect
or this 'bug.'
- 'Did you know that bitcoin mining generates the same
amount of carbon emissions as the entire country
of Thailand?'
- The last thing we need
is for the technology to be powered
by unsustainable energy.
- If you can take mining bitcoin,
doing it with green, renewable energy,
and knock out all of the miners
that are using inefficient coal
and other fossil fuels to mine bitcoin,
how could you not love that?
- Our increase in power consumption,
if it's done in a certain way,
can have carbon-negative impact.
- It's part of this whole new focus
going to sustainable sources
for everything that powers our lives.
And I believe that Bitcoin has the potential
to accelerate that movement.
The bitcoin mining process,
yes it takes a lot of energy,
but what most people don't understand
is that energy consumption is purposeful.
It's incredibly important to the protection of the network.
- The function of the bitcoin miner
is basically to solve a puzzle.
It takes a block of transactions,
it takes a random number, hashes them together.
If you are the one to first solve that puzzle,
then you get the reward.
In most cases of math,
you have to show that you're actually doing the work.
With bitcoin mining, it's that proof
that you did the work
that sets the value in the network.
- That process is very compute-intensive,
the participants are constantly looking
for cheap sources of energy,
efficient sources of energy,
which ultimately sort of brings us back
to renewable sources.
- The inspiration of Lancium
was first driven by a thesis in energy.
Renewable energy is the future,
and the energy transition is going to happen
faster than many people anticipated.
So the idea was, could we rethink a data center
and move them not to where the users are,
but where the energy is.
- Right down the center of the U.S.,
all the way down here in Texas,
it's called the U.S. “wind belt.”
If you go to the west, south portion,
for the best sun quality.
So you line up the best sun quality
and the best wind speed,
and you get this perfect overlap in west Texas.
But the problem is, it's the only commodity
on the planet that you can't store.
- And that we saw as an opportunity.
Could we control individual-server
power consumption
so that we could take a data center up and down?
- When electricity is abundant and cheap,
you consume energy.
When it's expensive and scarce,
we need you to turn off.
- There's about 30 megawatts of bitcoin mining
being done today.
This is one of the only facilities in the world
that will monitor the frequency of the grid in real-time
so that if the grid's approaching a brownout,
this bitcoin mining facility will respond
within 16 seconds to stabilize the grid.
- You see what the current condition is,
it shows the capacity above demand.
We provide services that actually
stabilize the grid and enable more renewable resources
to be used.
By doing that, we're providing
the cleanest application of bitcoin mining.
- Hello everyone.
We are thrilled to build
one of the world's largest data centers
that will serve as a template
for how we can change the grid fundamentally
to allow more renewable energy.
It will be one of the largest,
single bitcoin mines ever built,
with a focus on resolving an issue
that's stopping us to go to renewable energy.
We think it will be one of the most
sustainable sites ever built.
Our software will control the miners
so that we can act as a 'controllable load,'
and our partners will use their expertise
for running a mine.
- The core competency of Lancium
is really focused on the ability
to turn the bitcoin miners up and down.
It sounds easy in theory,
but so much of wind and solar energy
is created in kind of these harsh environments.
In west Texas, it's incredibly hot, incredibly dusty—
the biggest enemy of bitcoin miners is heat.
But immersion technology solves that.
Immersion technology essentially
uses a solution which runs
over the bitcoin miners at all times.
It simultaneously cools them down
and cleans them,
which really helps to solve the ability
to put bitcoin miners in this hot and dusty
renewable-energy environment.
We fundamentally believe that
the energy is part of what makes
the Bitcoin network so strong.
What we're trying to do,
is do it in such a way
that we drive adoption by other bitcoin miners.
- I think the mining industry
has a social, financial, and moral obligation
to use energy resources that are more sustainable—
such that the technology can survive,
and can reach its potential.
This is a way to make a dent
in a problem that we really just can't ignore anymore.
- If we are successful with our vision,
we will have shown
that bitcoin mining and other computing
can be a key component to a decarbonized future.