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A comment on Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days. Parent comment

Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by burger_moon on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:12PM (#10775288)
After searching around, it looks about average for a large data center. This link[1] estimates Google's data centers require between 50-100MW.

50MW is enough power to supply ~14k homes from different references I've seen.

I'm curious about what normal data centers use for backup power since natural gas and diesel generators don't get much bigger than 2MW. Or maybe they just don't have backup generators.

[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-data-center-faq-pa...

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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by neurotech1 on Monday December 21, 2015 @09:51PM (#10775479)
They do. Natural Gas fueled generators are practical at 50MW capacity. GE basically sells a 747 engine (CF6) driving a generator, known as the LMS6000

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Electric_LM6000

[1] http://www.geaviation.com/marine/engines/military/lm6000/

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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by burger_moon on Monday December 21, 2015 @11:08PM (#10775763)
I understand that gas turbines can produce that kind of power, in fact I used to work on some pretty large turbines and turbo generators in the 500-1000MW range. However they aren't used as backup generators where they have to be online in a minute. These are the types of generators I was referring to, https://powergen.gepower.com/products/reciprocating-engines/...
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by techdragon on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @12:04AM (#10775937)
More batteries to get over the slower generator startup time, and likely quite a few smaller generators to do the best they can to keep the batteries going if the big generator is slower than expected to startup that day.
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by mpnordland on Monday December 21, 2015 @10:13PM (#10775568)
That's probably the most awesome thing I've heard tonight.
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by ajaimk on Monday December 21, 2015 @11:12PM (#10775772)
That is cool. Wonder what the efficiency of one of those will be.
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by iSnow on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @05:30AM (#10776891)
40%, it's in the linked Wikipedia article.
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by ctennis1 on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @07:22AM (#10777289)
I ran a ~10MW capable facility for a while, we had 8 2MW Cummins gensets that would run in parallel. Extra units for redundancy as sometimes units would be offline for oil changes or other routine maintenance.
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Re:Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over t... by acveilleux on Tuesday December 22, 2015 @09:18AM (#10777843)
Maybe want to checkout engines from Wärtsilä.

They have gas capable engines (50DF series, 50cm cylinder bore) with ratings up to 975kW/cylinders and up to 18 cylinders or 17MW per genset at 60hz.

They're not the only player in that field. Fairbanks-Morse sells the Colt-Pielstick PC2.6 line with 750kW per cylinder at 600rpm and up to 16 cylinders for 11.5 MW @ 60hz. They also sell MAN 48/60 engines that go up to 21MW and MAN natural gas 51/60 G engines up to 18.5 MW.

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