Bitcoin Forum

 Would buying a small power plant be very profitable just to mine for bitcoin?

Not near enough information to know. You would need a business plan.  Things to know such as price of the plant, and price of electricity it's producing.

Most "power plants" are out of reach on price to buy.  It chances are is cheaper to find cheap electricity and build data center there.

  Is it a nuclear power plant?  If it is, then no because you would be required to maintain a fund for the eventual decommissioning of the plant at the end of its useful life.

I don't see anything wrong with this plan. Presuming you either own an oil refinery or the rights to dam a large river.

On another note, no, you will only lose money. Solar panels and wind power are far too expensive to set up.

http://itsalwayssunny.wikia.com/wiki/The_Gang_Solves_the_Gas_Crisis

You will need to provide many more details. From the sound of it, it appears that you are asking a mining operation at large, for that the answer is no. There is also the halving which is predicted to come next year, and will cause you to be on loss too

It would cost a TON to get something like that set up, and mining isn't even really profitable right now.  If you want to try a large scale farm, the most cost efficient way is to rent out a industrial building with a lot of power capacity, or potentially work out a deal with a local datacenter.  

I would agree it's hard to justify solar/fans even.  I cannot imagine any "power plant" that you can justify buying.

And if you have that much capital to start you can pretty much research low electricity and start up there for your data center.

not worth it at all, with the current price situation, you need a big farm to gain something worth it, better to buy bitcoin and trading them if you are good at it

shorting seems a good strategy right now

I believe the emphasis should be on the word "small". Then the answer is Yes. With a small nuclear reactor, you could put it to mining bitcoins, what could go wrong???

For many uses, solar panels are dramatically cheaper than they used to be, but I'm not an expert on large scale projects.

Add in the battery bank so that you could mine for the other half a day its dark, and there is 0% chance you hit ROI

I would love to be wrong if anyone can show good solar for cheap.  I just personally have not seen it yet for me.  At decent priced electricity I cant make the solar choice yet.

Can solar really provide uninterrupted and sustainable power to be used for mining? How does it work during the nigh, there is a some kind of battery I assume?

Believe it or not this is what Alcoa does - the Aluminum manufacturer.

I had the privilege of spending a few days at their 50k Ton Press Facility and got to see them making parts for the F-15 Raptor Jet.

Impressive - they run their own (I think off memory) 25 MegaWatt Power Plant; and create their own Coke (Aluminum Product) - and all byproducts of the process are moved via huge conveyor belts elevated above the site to other areas of the plant where they are turned into all sorts of products that are then sold. Even the ash is moved offsite; churned into something else and sold.

But yea; they basically figured it was cheaper to own a plant than pay for AC - and they sell to the grid whatever they dont use themselves.

Strato

Add in the 50% government subsidy.

If you really want to learn there's a ton of pdfs about solar panels you can find online.
Basically the panels are giving you power during the day and charging batteries that are used at night. There's an automatic switch that chooses between the sources and makes you draw power from the batteries not only at night, but also when you're using more than the panels can provide.
Here's an example of such power bank with a controller.
http://longmansuntech.co.in/images/project4.png

My opinion: I agree that under almost all situations the answer is no. However, if you were for
example in a middle eastern country or venezuela, where you can get oil almost for free, and if
you didnt care about the environment, you could go for a small oil power plant.

As far as I know, energy from oil scales down well. For example, you can get a small petrol generator
for 250 $ but there is no nuclear plant for home use  ;) So for well below 1 million you can get
something decent built up, especially if it doesnt have to last for decades. You can't beat the
production cost of the professional plants, but you should get below
the market price. This is of course no real economical benefit, it just follows from
oil being too cheap and electricity being too expensive (relatively seen) in most of
the mentioned countries (I didn't check for all, but for Saudi arabia it is the case).

I am surprised this thread keeps going on.  If you have the amount of money to buy a power plant, you have enough money to build pretty much anywhere. 

This means you can follow cheap electricity.   And if big enough possibly get special rates in certain places.   You in 99 percent of cases would be better off with just paying a low electricity rate.    If you own a electric plant think of extra costs.  You need workers paying salary and wadges.  There is just a lot of extra cost's that I don't think will equal the benefit of owning it.

small power plant? I dont think theres such thing as a "small" power plant.

Its all usually bigger like a commercial estate level, which is run by entities tie within government contracts. Eventually you would need roof top solar panels, and things that take over that can off set the electricity usage.

Oh there is. Small water generators are quite popular in some parts of the world. Here's one in Switzerland to prove the point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WShtAn5_EY
They also have a lot of these small things in Scotland. The downside is they are producing <5kW so there's no way to sustain a large mining operation with that.

This must be a troll thread, pls close this one down. Small power plan costs a lot of money and people who have this kind of money do not ask these stupid questions.