Solar farm

[Conack]

As the local guy that knows something about stuff, I was asked the following:

#1 Would it be profitable to build a solar farm dedicated to mining, with the excess sold off to municipality/eskom?

The first concern I raised (as a City Skylines player), is what happens at night: If they're going to go big, then you'll need some serious batteries to keep things going at night. A bunch of pylontech batteries can get pretty expensive.

#2 Instead of trying to do it all DIY, I suggested chatting with a miner / mining group to hear if someone would be interested to move their rig to the solar farm and work together with them to set the place up optimally from the ground up.


They're planning on pushing a few megawatts worth of power.
Any suggestions would be great.

 

[goldfritter]

Overall this question is basically the same as: "will I save money on electricity in the long run if I convert my house to be 100% off the grid on solar?" And the answer to that, depending on a lot of factors, is possibly, but only in many years' time.

If you start with a basic power draw (ask a miner how much power his rig draws) you can multiply that by the number of possible partners in the endeavour and take that number to a solar expert person for an estimate on how much it would cost to run that many watts off-the-grid, exactly the same way you'd do with your house. Then you can work out the capital plus running costs of that over, say, five years, and compare that to how much it would have cost to just get it from Eskom.

Two complications to the equation are: A) how much more money do you make if you are able to mine during load shedding or power cuts (to do this you need to multiply profit per hour, which any miner will tell you is a moving target, by the number of hours of load shedding per year), and B) can you make money selling back to the grid (how over-specced is your "farm," and how much do you get paid per KWh by the municipality). I don't even know if any municipalities allow you to do this? But either way you can make an estimate on those factors.

You also need to factor in things like rent and upfront costs of the land where the farm will be; security; internet (mining needs stable internet), whether it will be registered as a business, tax implications... etc.

Once you've worked all that out you can determine if it is more cost effective to go for a farm setup, or for each person to just buy their own rig and run it off Eskom at their house, maybe together with an off-the-shelf inverter to run it during load shedding. This is where my expertise ends, so I can't comment on which option is likely to be better... But my gut feeling is that it's the latter.

 

[Confucius]

There’s many factors at play. Location of such a farm being one of them. Cape Town has a very different weather pattern compared to Gauteng.

The cheapest form of solar would be a grid tie system. It’s the lowest Capex. You can then add batteries for loadshedding or even a large generator would work out cheaper. It’s not like loadshedding happens all the time… or rather not yet.

Batteries don’t come cheap and no one knows what mining profitability is going to be like next year or the year after.

Also, if they want to go with really big storage, then they should not be looking at pylontech. Perhaps some diy battery builds would work out a lot cheaper.

 

[sc00bs]

ROI on a Grid-Tie is about 3 years.

 

[Liebrecht]

As an Electrician I can tell you if you are using 1 rig that is using 1 kilo watt of power per hour like a
L3+ you can work on 17 hours of no sun-lite as you work on a 7 hour solar day as an avg, that leaves you with 17 hours of no solar panels, that would have to run off, of battery power @ R5000 per KW that would mean you have to lay out R85 000 just in batteries for one 1 kilo watt rig, that is mining about R3000 per month, the ROI is not worth it, not at the moment anyway.

I would and is busy slowly building my mining farm up on Eskom for now, and slowly moving over to solar, you can find units that "mix" Eskom and solar, so you use solar first and then get the sort fall from Eskom, you can start by saving some money that way, solar panels are't the expensive part, is't the batteries and inverters that'll bankrupt you

 

[beesblaas89]

Jip can attest to the above - have a mining rig doing approx 1-2kwh with panels during the day. Approx 6-7hrs sunlight but in the evening Eskom. Just not worth the investment on the batteries