Good.
Nearby residents had complained about the noise that would be generated by the 1,246 fans required to cool the facility, which would be as close as 1,000 feet to existing homes. Opponents also noted that Compute North had chosen a parcel in a census tract where the majority of residents are Black or Hispanic. This would have been another instance of putting an environmentally undesirable facility in the backyards of poor people.
Those are excellent reasons why the Pitt County commissioners should have denied permission to build. But there's a different reason why I'm delighted that the project is dead.
The data center would have consumed 150 megawatts of power. To put this in perspective, the Shearon Harris nuclear power plant near Raleigh generates 900 megawatts when it's operating at 100%. Yes, that's right, a single data center would have consumed the equivalent of one-sixth of the entire nuclear plant.
If this were Google, Amazon, or Apple's data center, I wouldn't object. Those companies provide services to paying customers. But Compute North wanted to build this $54 million data center for bitcoin mining, a for-profit activity that benefits no one except the miners — and only when the price of bitcoin, which has gyrated wildly over the years, is high enough to justify the expense of the electricity.
China, which is chronically short on electricity and also deeply suspicious of cryptocurrency (and probably for good reason), recently tossed bitcoin miners out of the country. Now those miners are looking for other places. Imagine that… China is outsourcing an undesirable business to the United States. Welcome to the new world.
Before you say that the data center's enormous appetite for electricity could have been met with solar, bear in mind that the data center will run at full capacity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. The sun doesn't shine that much.
Before you say that the data center would generate jobs, bear in mind that Compute North's filing indicated that the data center would be largely unstaffed during operation. Well, of course — the bit miners' profitability would be decreased if the data center actually needed employees.
Compute North pointed out that the data center could be used for purposes other than, or in addition to, bit mining. That's like saying that a school bus could be used to deliver Amazon packages. Yes, it's technically possible but that's not why school buses are built and it's how how 99.99% of school buses are used.
Good riddance, Compute North.
