The fire forced the facility to go offline to maintain safety, but none of the company’s mining hardware was damaged in the incident.
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Greenidge Generation Holdings, a Bitcoin () mining company, disclosed that a fire broke out at its mining facility in Dresden, New York, where it co-hosts operations with mining company NYDIG.
The fire broke out on Sunday due to an “electrical switchgear failure,” forcing the company to de-energize the entire facility, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) .
The fire did not damage the mining rigs, and the company said it would resume normal operations within a “few weeks,” without providing specific dates.
Greenidge’s Dresden site generates 106 megawatts of natural gas energy to power its mining operations and machines co-hosted with NYDIG, according to .
The downtime caused by the fire showcased the challenges of commercial mining operations, which operate on thin margins and must weather , high energy costs, equipment failures, dwindling block rewards, and regulatory hurdles to remain profitable.
Related:
Hashprice, a critical metric for miner profitability that measures expected profits per unit of computing power, petahashes per second (PH/s) in November as BTC plunged to lows of about $80,000.
For context, mining operations typically become unprofitable around the $40 PH/s level. The hash price is back to about $39 PH/s at the time of this writing, according to Hashrate .
Stablecoin issuer Tether confirmed it in Uruguay on Tuesday, citing surging energy costs as the main reason for the exit.
The company was also in a dispute with a local state-owned energy provider over $4.8 million in unpaid energy bills and fees.
Bitmain, one of the leading mining hardware manufacturers, is now over national security concerns.
The officials are probing whether Bitmain’s application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), the hardware used to mine proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies, could be remotely accessed and used for espionage.
Bitmain is a Chinese company that has about an 80% market share of mining hardware, and any potential ban could make things even more challenging for the mining industry.
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