Energy Monitoring for Crypto Mining Farms – Ethereum and BTC in UAE

Energy monitoring and energy management system installations were mostly about facilities management applications and BMS (Building management systems) in UAE, wherein clients and stakeholders want a clear understanding of how much they are paying for the energy consumption, and which entities within their facilities/buildings are consuming the most amount of energy. On the other side, technical personnel use remote energy monitoring as a tool for better understanding of the load patterns and troubleshooting issues such as power surges or reducing downtime due to mishaps within the power systems.

However, last month, Royal Rubber Electric had an opportunity to install a remote energy monitoring system for a Bitcoin and Ethereum Mining Farm in Abu Dhabi. 

Crypto Mining Hardware and Concepts.

Located in a warehouse somewhere around Abu Dhabi and Al Ain Border, the mining rig had a combination of two ASIC based miners.

Terminator 2 (T2) Miner (Bitcoin Miner)

Algorithm: SHA256 (Merkle Tree)

Hashrate: 17.2Th/S

Consumption: 1570W

A10 Pro ETH Miner (Etheruem Miner)

Algorithm: ETHash

Hashrate: 750 Mh/s (±6%)

Consumption: 1300W

Hashrate is basically the total computational power used by a cryptocurrency network to process transactions and the algorithm helps in verifying these transactions within the blockchain network based on proof-of-work done by the miners.

The miners/mining rigs solve complex cryptographic functions or say puzzles, that are generated within the blockchain for every new transaction, the miners solve this with all the computational power. The miner that solves it first, gets rewarded for mining the block and solving the puzzle that enabled the transaction within the network. The more the computational power, the better chance that your miner can solve it. This is just the tip of the iceberg, but some more research by curious readers will help them know a lot more about cryptocurrency mining.

Energy Monitoring Aspects

The rig in this energy monitoring project boasts of 600 miners, which runs 24×7 without interruptions. The only interruption is when the rig is not cooled efficiently, which heats it up and it ends up burning or even blowing up. This facility did experience a few incidents like this and had to spend a few thousand dollars to replace the miner.

Moreover, this did help them understand the importance of cooling and the team invested in an efficient water-cooling system for the rigs.

The Energy consumption varies from 27kWh to 38kWh every day for one miner unit depending on the types mentioned earlier. Running at 100% capacity, this mining farm will consume around 18-20 MWh in one day. High load consumption would be an understatement. This is far from an entire 3 storied building in UAE.

Right now, the farm is running at 30% capacity with about a max of 7.7kW of instantaneous power. The maintenance team mentioned how you wouldn’t be able to stand inside a full capacity running farm due to the noise made by each miner, and how they need to wear ear defenders in case of repairs.

The EMS solution at Royal Rubber Electric helped the stakeholders have a constant watch on the farm’s energy consumption and get an idea of their ROI. The technical team can get per second data directly from the energy meters using an SD card. The meter has about 24 parameters such as Voltage LN, Phase current, Energy, Power, Frequency and Power factor for each Line, and 3 phases combined. There is an option for humidity and temperature sensor on the same meter, which is recorded by the meter and transmitted to the custom-built cloud-based energy monitoring and management platform. There is also an option for setting alarms using timers both on the meter and the cloud-based platform which can inform the onsite technicians if a certain threshold set by the user has reached the limit for a specific parameter.

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