In the Russian Federation buy power stations for mining cryptocurrency

Recently it became known that private investors began to buy power stations for mining cryptocurrency. So far we are talking about small thermal power plants in the Perm Territory, which businessman Alexei Kolesnik purchased from Viktor Vekselberg’s T Plus company. According to experts, the relatively low prices for electricity and legal regulations make it possible to develop cryptodata centers in the Russian Federation. True, the problem may be the low efficiency of old thermal power plants.

Fuel consumption for them is 1.5 times higher than the average in the Russian energy system. According to Natalia Prokhorova from ACRA, the cost of electricity for the data center or mining at these stations will be about 40% lower than the prices for consumers in these regions. However, the cost of electricity, even in this case, is comparable to that in Siberia.

The stations belong to the company Gubakha Energy Company LLC (SEC), which was also sold to crypto-businessmen. According to official data, Nadezhda Simanova was the buyer of the assets from Vekselberg. However, the real owner is Aleksey Kolesnik, who at the end of December became the head of OOO GEK, writes Kommersant. He is also the CEO and principal owner of Nordix-Perm LLC, a company that sells fuel.

One of the stations is Kizelskaya GRES (Perm Territory, 23.6 MW), the second is Sarapulskaya TPP (Udmurtia, 10 MW). The company "T Plus" sold them separately. The power plant was sold for 30 million rubles, and the heat and power plant and city networks - for 129.3 million rubles. It was decided to sell these assets because of their unprofitability, first of all, of the Kizelovskaya TPP, which supplies the city of Gubakha with heat.

According to Alexei Kolesnik, the acquired power plants may indeed begin to be used as a source of energy for mining cryptocurrencies, but the scenario of creating a business center next to the object is also likely. “In the future, there is an idea to develop a data center: this is not just mining. In addition, there is the “Spring Law” that information should be stored in Russia, and the data center is a regular server room, ”said Kolesnik. “We are also considering a variant with cryptocurrency, but before adopting a legislative framework we are not planning to do this closely.”

Previously, proposals on the transformation of industrial enterprises into cryptocurrency mining centers were repeatedly received from business representatives and officials. So, in the middle of August, it became known that the Internet ombudsman Dmitry Marinichev was in talks with Rosenergoatom about the location of a mining farm based on a data center near the Kalinin nuclear power plant (Tver region). Proposals for the provision of infrastructure and excess capacity of power plants "Eurosibenergo" miner received Oleg Deripaska, the owner of this company.

It should be noted that the cryptocurrency sphere in the country has not yet been regulated by law. The Ministry of Finance of Russia only began to develop a law on cryptocurrency. At the same time, from July 1, 2018, the “Spring package”, which is often called anti-terrorism, obliges Internet companies to keep data on the facts of receiving and transmitting data for at least one year. As for telecom operators, in their case the duration of data storage should be three years.

Data centers in any country where the IT sector is developed consume a lot of energy, and in the budget of some data centers about 50% is allocated for energy acquisition costs. This is even higher than in the aluminum industry, where a lot of electricity is consumed. Nevertheless, the cost of cryptocurrency allows you to mine bitcoin or ether now without much regard to the price of energy. As mentioned above, officials and businessmen propose the creation of Russian mining centers. So, Sergei Gorkov, head of the VEB, spoke about interest in creating them last July, while Deputy Prime Minister Yury Trutnev suggested using DFO power capacities for this purpose.

Analysts believe that the prospects for the development of data centers in Russia are connected precisely with the requirements to store data within countries and relatively low relative to global indicators of electricity prices.