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TeraWulf’s Nuclear Bitcoin
Plant Is Just One Piece of
the Green Mining Puzzle Your Email

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Puzzle
Terawulf’s newest nuclear-powered
Bitcoin miner in Pennsylvania isn’t the
firm’s first attempt at going green.
By Tim Hakki
Feb 28, 2023 8 min read
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Nautilus is one of the first nuclear-powered

Bitcoin mines in the U.S. Image: Terawulf.

In Northeast Pennsylvania, a
unique Bitcoin mining
experiment is about to come
online.
Called Nautilus, Terawulf is
spinning up a nuclear-
powered mining facility.

AD

First announced back in 2021,

Terawulf said that when
Nautilus is at full capacity
later in Q1 this year, the
facility’s fleet of 15,000 mining
rigs will have a hash rate of 1.6
exahashes per second
(EH/s). That amounts to 1.6
quintillion hashes every
second, or about 0.54% of the
total computational power of
the entire Bitcoin mining
network today, which is
currently running at 294.09
EH/s.

More importantly, though,

none of this new mining
capacity will be powered by
fossil fuels, potentially
addressing years-long
criticism of the premier
cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin uses a proof-of-work

(PoW) mining algorithm to
(PoW) mining algorithm to
validate transactions and
secure the network. Miners, or
computers optimized for
verifying transactions and
getting rewarded in Bitcoin,
currently consume around 117
terawatt hours a year—the
equivalent of a small country. 

This figure doesn’t look like it

will be slowing down anytime
soon, either, as miners
continue to deploy updated
machines and even whole new
fleets. The amount of global
computing power used to mine
Bitcoin, understood as hash
rate, has been on a steady rise
since 2016. 

Bitcoin’s global hash rate since inception.

Source: CoinWarz.

It’s not just miners watching

this chart, either. With roughly
62% of the current energy mix
powering all those machines
coming from fossil fuels,
regulators are taking note too.

Just last year, New York signed

a two-year moratorium
banning any new fossil-fuel-
powered Bitcoin miners to set
up shop within state
boundaries. A similar proposal

targeting proof-of-work (PoW)

mining was also put before
European lawmakers, who
comfortably voted it down. 

When asked if he had any

concerns about a regulatory
clampdown on PoW-based
mining, Terawulf’s co-founder,
CTO, and COO Nazar Khan told
Decrypt that he hopes “they
take input from people like
ourselves.” 

Terawulf takes aim at

green Bitcoin mining

Founded in 2021 by Nazar

Khan and Paul Prager, who
were senior executives of
Beowulf, an energy
infrastructure company Prager
had launched in 1990,
Terawulf pitched itself as a
“leading sustainable Bitcoin
mining company.” 

AD

When he began learning more

about crypto in 2017, Khan had

already spent over twenty

already spent over twenty
years developing and
operating power-generation
facilities in the U.S. and
abroad. 

“Once I started to understand

how Bitcoin mining worked, it
was clear to me that efficient
and economic Bitcoin mining
was heavily dependent on
infrastructure and the cost of
energy,” Khan says of his early
days networking with miners. 

“Pick the name of a Bitcoin

miner and I’ve probably talked
to them at some point, trying
to find a way to work
together,” he told Decrypt. “I
said, ‘hey, I know power, I
know energy, let me find
someone who knows Bitcoin
mining.’ It became very clear
to me that the level of
sophistication in the space
around energy, energy
procurement, and
development was very low.”

Bitcoin Miners Go
Nuclear in Search
of Clean Energy
Amid ongoing criticism
around Bitcoin’s hefty
Bitcoin carbon footprint, mining…
firms are now turning to a
News
new sourceBusiness
of energy:
3 min read
nuclear.  In July, Bitcoin
mining
Scott firm Compass
Chipolina
Mining
Sep already embraced
27, 2021
nuclear energy after

partnering with Oklo, a

A year before founding
Terawulf, Khan’s team had
also completed the
construction of a large-scale
facility for Marathon, one of
the world’s largest mining
companies. 

This collaboration was

followed by a call from energy
company Talen, whose
subsidiary, Cumulus Data, had
built a data center adjoining
the parent company’s 2.5
gigawatt Susquehanna nuclear
power plant to host Bitcoin
mining operations. 

Thus, Nautilus was born.

Add Nautilus’ stats to the

projected 3.8 EH/s capability
of Terawulf’s hydro-powered
Lake Marina facility on the
western side of the state of
New York and it’s clear that
Terawulf will have one of the
biggest Bitcoin mining
operations in the world,
powered almost exclusively by
renewable energy. 

But it's about more than crypto

miners tapping into abundant
clean energy. 

Bitcoin Mining Is
Booming Despite
Market Headwinds
 Market Headwinds
Bitcoin mining has never
been harder, according to
Bitcoin the latest data. The…
network’s mining difficulty
Deep Dives
hit a new Long
all-time Reads
high of
8 min read
37.59 trillion hashes after
posting
Tim Hakkia rare
Jan increase
24, 2023 of
over 10% on January 15, the
highest leap since last
November—the only time
in 2022 when mining
Khan said how the Terawulf
difficulty increased by a
double-digit percentage. 
team’s long In
experience
addition to ainhigh
mining difficulty, data from
energy infrastructure can also
CoinWarz shows that
Bitcoin’s hashlike
help make operations rate, best
understood as the
Nautilus and Lake Marina
computational power of
the network, has also been
reliable consumers
stead... of Talen’s

excess renewably-sourced
electricity, but also responsive
assets for local electrical grid
operators. 

The term “asset” broadly refers

to mining farms that are both
useful to have on a grid, and
intangible assets to energy
providers, offering high
customer lifetime value (CLV)
—essentially the value derived
from having regular,
dependable customers—
thanks to their strategic
locations that can keep energy
prices low.

AD
It’s all about location

In 2016, Beowulf parent

company Riesling Power LLC
bought a decommissioned coal
plant in Somerset, on the
western side of New York
state. The Paris Agreement had
been signed in New York City
the previous year, leading to a
76% reduction in plans for
new coal plants across the
globe. The team knew they
were essentially buying the
plant to retire it. 

The plant was integrated into

the state grid through a
network of transmission lines
—those thick cables you see
held up by imposing towers
along global motorways. When
it was operational, the
transmission lines were rigged
to move 700 megawatts of
power out of the plant and
onto the grid.

Due to Khan’s professional

background in energy
infrastructure, though, he
knew Terawulf could just as
easily move 700 megawatts of
power into the site to feed a
fleet of Bitcoin miners. 

Bitcoin $22,308.02
BTC -0.84%
 Powered by crypto.com

Khan then began sourcing

energy for the site and found
that the local zone (Zone A) of
the grid—which is controlled
by a not-for-profit company
called the New York System
Independent System Operator
(NYISO)—produces “about
four to five gigawatts” of
power drawing from primarily
renewable sources, namely
hydroelectric power. 

By March 2022, Terawulf’s first

Bitcoin mine was operational:
Lake Marina. 

Of that five gigawatts, local

demand only soaks up “a gig
or a gig and a half” leaving an
excess generation of more
than three gigawatts to be
conducted by transmission
lines across the state, mostly
to feed the Big Apple’s energy
demands, known to the power
industry as the “New York City
load pocket.”

Knowing local energy

demands is key for
strategically placing mining
plants. If you position massive
electrical loads in areas of
high demand, you’re not only

going to get high prices, you

may drive them up further. 

“Bitcoin mining is one of the

most efficient and economic
load sinks around,” Khan
explained. “We’re locating our
loads in places where there’s
high electricity supply and not
much demand, so we can be a
‘sink’ to soak up energy at
attractive prices while
providing a way to sell
electricity in places where
there typically aren’t many
buyers.”

Location is everything, but

even more so for renewables.
Nuclear reactors and
hydroelectric plants don’t stop
generating, and these facilities
sometimes run for years
without stopping.

And just as not having enough

energy can cause rolling
blackouts, like what was seen
in Texas last year, having too
much energy can be just as
dangerous for a grid. 

AD
Herein lies another potential
advantage of well-placed
mining outfits.

They can turn machines off

almost instantly during high
demand or skim off excess
energy from a grid when
there's a high supply.

Grid operators' minds

blown

The grid is designed to meet

peak demand plus a margin,
but it only hits peak demand
for 50-100 hours a year, says
Khan. 

That’s generally not something

to worry about for a mining
farm soaking up abundant
clean energy in a low-demand
area, but if the grid gets too
heated, Terawulf’s mines—and
Bitcoin mines in general—can
drop their demands in
seconds. 

This is thanks to a tool at grid

operators’ disposal called
Automatic Generation Control
(ACG). ACG adjusts the output
of generators at different
power plants in a given area of
the grid to maintain a balance

between generation in a given

area (the power produced) and
area (the power produced) and
electrical load (the power
consumed). 

If a grid operator needs to add

15 or 25 megawatts to an area
where the load is tight, Khan
explains, they send a signal to
a power plant in an area with
excess generation to tell it to
come down. In other words,
when operators need to add
generation to an area, they
have to bring it down
somewhere else. 

Typically, ACG has a 15-minute

response time, so from the
moment the grid operators
send the signal to the plant to
the moment the plant has
achieved its satisfactory level,
a quarter of an hour has
passed. 

Is Bitcoin Mining
Finally Getting
Greener?
As the price of Bitcoin
surged over the past year,
Bitcoin so did the noise around t…
environmental impact of
Sponsored
Bitcoin mining,Postan energy-
By Saidler & Co.
intensive process in which
6 min read
large computers race to
solve math
Mason problems and
Marcobello
Jul 31, 2021
win the right to upload
bundles of transaction data
to the network.  Bitcoin
mining uses a method
called Proof of Work
For Bitcoin mining, the
(PoW), and it’s been no
stranger
response time to criticism
is more like from
regulators and
environmentalists. Their
fifteen seconds. 
main contention is over the
increasingly large amount
of energy (computational
“[Grid operators’] mind is kind
of blown when they think
about it,” said Khan. “We have
a load that’s responsive in 10,
20, 50, 100 megawatts in less
than a minute, and you can
bring it back up just as quickly.
That kind of responsiveness is
unheard of, and when
operators understand how
responsive we can be, they’re
enamored with it.” 

This rapid response time is

due to the fact that a typical
top-of-the-line Application-
Specific Integrated Circuit
(ASIC) or mining machine can
be turned off in less than a
minute, making even a fleet of
them more responsive than a
nuclear generator. 

AD

The signal to turn off can also

be scheduled a day ahead or in
real time with no difference in
the ability of the electric load

to respond. This isn’t the case

with most industrial-scale
with most industrial-scale
loads. 

Seen this way, miners like

Terawulf emerge less as
pioneers of green crypto
mining, and more as another
tool that grid operators can
turn to maintain a delicate
balance of supply and
demand.

Miners can change their needs

on a dime, soaking up excess
energy when there's a glut of
energy, or turning their
machines off in the case of
higher demands elsewhere. 

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