By
Godfrey Benjamin
April 20th, 2024
TeraWulf is currently on an aggressive expansion and is planning to have a total operational capacity of 50,000 miners (5.5 EH/s) in early Q2 2023, which is nearly 160MW of power demand.
US-based Bitcoin mining firm TeraWulf recently inaugurated a new crypto-mining facility in Pennsylvania that solely runs through on-site nuclear power generated. In a statement on Monday, March 6, TeraWulf stated that the Nautilus Cryptomine facility is the first “Behind the meter” Bitcoin mining facility.
It means that it directly uses the energy generated on-site instead of getting it through a grid. The 2.5 gigawatt (GW) Susquehanna nuclear generation station at the Nautilus Cryptomine directly sources carbon-free power.
As of now, TeraWulf has got nearly 8,000 mining rigs online that represent a hashrate capacity of approximately 1.0 EH/s. With this, the company has energized roughly half of its 50-MW stake in the Nautilus Cryptomine facility.
TeraWulf said that the remaining mining rigs (another 8,000 of them) will go live over the coming weeks. Furthermore, the company has the option to add an additional 50MW of Bitcoin mining facility at the Nautilus Cryptomine facility. Commenting on the development, Paul Prager, Chairman and CEO of TeraWulf said:
“With the recent energization of the Nautilus facility earlier this month, approximately 16,000 of TeraWulf’s owned miners, representing 1.9 EH/s of self-mining capacity, are onsite and being brought online daily. The Nautilus nuclear-powered mining facility benefits from what is arguably the lowest cost power in the sector, just $0.02/kWh for a term of five years. We look forward to continuing to work alongside Cumulus Coin as the Nautilus facility increases operational hash rate in the coming weeks.”
As per TeraWulf, the Nautilus Cryptomine shall likely reach a 300 MW capacity upon completion and will be among the largest mines in North America.
TeraWulf Expansion Plans
Announced back in August 2021, the Nautilus mining facility is the outcome of a joint venture between TeraWulf’s nuclear mining facility subsidiary and power generation and infrastructure company Talen Energy Corporation.
Phase 1 of this joint venture involves the 180-MW “Nautilus Cryptomine” built on Talen’s digital infrastructure. TeraWulf claims to use zero-carbon energy with all of its mining facilities running on either nuclear, hydro, and solar energy.
Apart from its 50MW stake in the Nautilus facility, TeraWulf is currently expanding its Bitcoin mining operations at its wholly-owned Lake Mariner facility in New York. Here, it plans to increase the operational capacity from 60 MW to 110 MW.
By early Q2 2023, the company is planning to offer a combined operational capacity to nearly 50,000 Bitcoin miners.
The Nautilus facility will reduce TeraWulf’s energy costs significantly. The company has secured a power agreement of 2 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) of power for five years. This brings the total average energy costs down to 4 cents/kWh across its two facilities. This is 50% less than the U.S. industrial average of 9 cents/kWh.