Green Innovations Award for Bitfury’s Allied Control

In one of our recent articles, we talked about Allied Control and how their immersion cooling could shake up the world of Bitcoin mining as we know it. That being said, Allied Control’s immersion cooling solution has caught the attention of other industries as well. So much so that the company has even won the Green Innovations Award.

Immersion Cooling in Bitcoin Mining

The term “Bitcoin mining” is a topic of heavy debate just lately, and not just because of the lack of profitability. The hardware necessary to mine Bitcoin is not only expensive, but it also uses a ton of electricity to complete the computational calculations required to “mine” chunks of a Bitcoin.

Many people feel this is a waste of energy resources, even though there is a monetary gain to be made from mining Bitcoin, that is, assuming you have access to cheap or free electricity, or other ways of providing electricity to your mining hardware. On top of that, this hardware needs to be kept cool to function properly, which means more energy resources being “wasted” on the Bitcoin mining process in general.

Luckily, for all parties involved, companies such as Allied Control are coming up with solutions to make parts of the process more efficient. Allied Control has come up with a way to immersively cool hardware, which is up to 4,000 times more efficient compared to regular air cooling. Plus, it requires hardly any special resources to be made effective.

To put this a bit more into perspective, the NSA’s major data center in Utah consumes an average of 6.6 million gallons of water – for cooling purposes – on a monthly basis. On top of that, this facility embeds water in electricity generation, consuming an additional 1.8 liters of water per KWh in the United States. Needless to say, all of this consumption tallies up to a rather high number, so it is about time something was done to reduce it.

Allied Control’s two-phase immersion cooling solution allows for hardware to be cooled without wasting so many energy resources. In fact, it could cut down the electricity usage by up to 99%, without wasting any water or oil. This would be a major game changer in all parts of the world, but especially in the hot and humid parts of Asia.

Data Centers Are Not A Complete Solution

Right now, most Bitcoin mining operations are located in data centers that have access to cheap electricity. However, data centers are not the ideal solution in their current form, as they depend on the consumption of a ton of natural resources to cool the hardware running there 24/7.

While most companies used to host their hardware in California data centers, quite a few of them have moved to other parts of the US. Most of this can be attributed to the humid and hot weather conditions, which require the consumption of additional resources to reach the same effect. It goes without saying that, when push comes to shove, it is not financially viable to host large operations in a California or Utah data center.

“With California being in its fourth consecutive drought year and regulators proposing mandatory reduction of up to 35 percent in urban water consumption, Allied Control’s immersion cooling technology might offer an effective solution to cool down the many data centers serving the hungry and ever-growing demand of cloud services and other Silicon Valley applications. In our standard configuration, the closed-loop cooling units do not use evaporative water towers, and, as a result, the water usage effectiveness is close to zero (WUE <0.003 L/kWh).” – Kar-Wing Lau, vice president of operations at Allied Control, told DigitalMoneyTimes.

Due to Allied Control’s solution of drastically cutting back on resources required to provide sufficient cooling, they have been awarded the Green Innovations Award. None of this would have been made possible without receiving recognition from the Hong Kong government.

Source: Businesswire

Images Courtesy of Allied Control