Are any Bitcoin mining operations leveraging the Rankine cycle to produce additional power with the waste heat? Would be similar to turbocharging an engine.
Discussion
You mean something like 2 phase immersion cooling with an attached gas turbine instead of cooling the gas phase directly?
Exactly! It seems so obvious but I haven’t heard of anyone doing this. There must be some technical or engineering hurdle - there’s no way I’m the first person to think of this.
I guess capex would be extremely high. The 2 phase coolant alone is really expensive (eg 3M novec), let alone the complexity of designing the remaining system.
Maybe you could use cheap single phase coolant and a heat exchange to a 2nd circuit with ammonia etc. But still very expensive to build I guess
Makes sense. I did some quick Claude-assisted digging and the cost of coolant alone for a 1.2MW mining setup (~1 shipping container of miners) would approach $100k.
I’m sure it’ll make economic sense someday, but not yet.