Today, at the Fisher County Commissioners meeting, representatives from IREN came before the court to introduce themselves and to discuss a possible tax abatement for a project they want to set up in the county. Jason Date, Michael Leamons and Nicole Dill gave their spiel and promised jobs, retail sales and donations to local groups to make the project more lucrative. It sounds like what they want from the county is large, open land and an easy hook-up into electric transmission lines.
Jason described the company as a sustainable data center. I got excited
because I thought it meant all the county records would be in a huge,
searchable database. I was wrong.
IREN is a bitcoin mining company. An article from the New Scientist website, written by Matthew Sparkes, gives a pretty good description of bitcoin.
More important is the definition of a data center. It's a large, temperature-controlled warehouse filled with computers, according to a Science for Georgia document.
IREN has a project going in Childress. There is a video detailing the path to making that deal.
The company has already obtained several hundred acres in Fisher County, around the Wetsel Substation on FM 611, under the name IE US Development Holdings 5.
Looking over the internet, I couldn't figure out whether to be pro or con. Some say the data centers use too much energy and have a lot of emissions. Others say the data centers stabilize the electric grid by keeping energy expectations at a steady level. That is evidently done by using more electricity, that would otherwise be wasted, during slack periods, while using less electricity when energy is needed by other consumers, like during a heatwave or cold snap.
Soon we might be adding another line to our county industry banner: cattle, cotton, oil, wind energy, solar energy and bitcoin mining.
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