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Manchester official tries to calm fears over incoming crypto-mining operation
Some residents in northeast Iowa are raising concerns about a crypto-mining business that’s planning to build a large facility in the region. Their worries are focused on resources, namely, the amount of electricity and water that’ll be consumed, as well as the noise all of those server fans can generate.
During a Manchester City Council meeting this week, city manager Tim Vick answered a host of questions about the facility that will be built in the city’s industrial park.
“What they’re using are these 8-by-20-foot storage units that have been modular-configured for them to be able to put server racks in them and servers,” Vick says. “They’re proposing 50 of those buildings. They’re going to set on concrete pads on the gravel lot, and then for every one of those server units, they’ll have two cooling units.”
Vick says the development will draw power from a separate grid from the rest of the community, so electricity demand should not be an issue. While many large “server farms” are water-cooled, Vick says this one won’t be.
“The way they’re set up here, they’re not using a lot of water,” he says. “They’ll only have a bathroom in their office facility, and that’s what they use the water for, their main office. It’s not going to be used to cool the servers.”
The Cedar Falls-based company, Simple Mining, already has six sites across Iowa. Crypto-mining involves using specialized computer hardware to solve complex mathematical puzzles to create a form of cryptocurrency, like Bitcoins.
Server farms in out-of-state communities have been ridiculed for the amount of noise that’s generated by the hundreds of cooling fans all spinning at full blast, around the clock. Vick says the city council will explore that concern with a field trip.
“We’re going to go over to Cedar Falls, where their headquarters are,” Vick says. “They have a system set up there with a Cedar Falls utility, and we’ll check that out. What we’ve been told is you really can’t hear it off the property, once you get about 100 feet away.”
This is an emerging technology and Vick notes, a new style of industry for the area. “This is a different job set that we have. They will still be paying property taxes, they’ll pay franchise fees, but it’s a different opportunity, and it creates eight full-time jobs,” he says, “so for us to have new employees, new opportunities, I think that’s a benefit to the community.”
The site plan for the project was approved by the Manchester City Council in late December, and Vick says construction is scheduled to start later this spring.
