A firm that supports cryptocurrency mining is one step closer to starting operations now that officials have amended Pitt County’s zoning ordinance to allow large-scale data processing facilities to operate here.
Compute North, a Minnesota-based firm that operates facilities in Nebraska, South Dakota and Texas, sought the change approved by the Pitt County Board of Commissioners on Monday.
“We’re growing rapidly and we’d love to come to Pitt County,” said Jeff Jackson, the company’s vice president of site development. Site selection is underway, he said. The company expects to build on 15 acres.
Compute North’s work is mainly in cryptocurrency, said Kristyan Mjolsnes, vice president of marketing. Cryptocurrency includes unique digital assets such as Bitcoin.
The assets created, or “mined,” by banks of data processors that solve complex computational puzzles, Mjolsnes said. These assets are accepted as currency by a growing number of enterprises. El Salvador recently became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender.
Compute North hopes to have its local project finalized within a month and construction underway by year’s end, Mjolsnes said.
“The county has been very welcoming thus far and all our interactions have been very positive. I am hopeful and optimistic we’ll see this project come to completion,” Mjolsnes said.
Jackson said the company is evaluating multiple sites outside of the Greenville city limits, he said. “The project is likely to be a greenfield development, in other words, it will most likely not be in an existing industrial park.”
A greenfield development is a development on vacant land.
Compute North does not use traditional large data center buildings, Mjolsnes said. Instead, it builds small, contained modular data centers that can be quickly installed. She said company’s model is to start running data as quickly as possible while additional structures and installed.
A series of modular units on concrete pads will be aligned in rows; about four or five buildings an acre. Mjolsnes said the facility will have a local workforce of 20 people.
Compute North’s facilities move outside air through the units to cool the equipment, Mjolsnes said.
“These containers are really innovative and well engineered,” she said. In Nebraska, where temperatures were in the 90s for long stretches this summer, and there were days when it reached the 100s, the outside air system did its job.
“The (data) equipment itself has a higher tolerance for heat than some traditional rack server type of equipment that requires more intensive cooling mechanism,” she said. “They are a good fit for that type of modular design.”
Compute North is working with Greenville Utilities Commission on the project, Mjolsnes said.
While data processing facilities are traditional large users of electricity, that has some appeal to energy companies and grid operators in the region, she said.
“We offer a consistent energy load which brings a certain amount of stability and predictability to that energy company,” Mjolsnes said. “And because the workload is non-mission critical it can be interrupted. What that means is during times of peak demand or crisis, there’s been some widespread outage due to weather, we can participate in demand response where we can be curtailed, essentially throttle down to relieve that pressure on the grid and redirect that power demand elsewhere.”
A amendment to the zoning ordinance was needed because North Carolina law says if a land use is not “expressly permitted in your zoning ordinance,” it isn’t allowed to operate in the county, Pitt County Planning and Development Services Director James Rhodes said.
The amendment added data processing facility (large scale) as a special use, requiring approval of the board of commissioners, in rural-agricultural, rural-residential, general commercial and highway commercial zoning districts and as a permitted right in light industrial and general industrial districts, Rhodes said.
Rhodes said the requirements for permitting large scale data processing facilities is patterned after the county’s solar farm rules because they operate on similar scales.
The development standards will require that systems, equipment and structures, excluding electric transmission lines and utility poles, shall not exceed 35 feet in height. All equipment and structures shall be a minimum of 50 feet from the boundary of the facility and 100 feet from any residence. Security fencing at least 8 feet high must be installed around the facility.
Because such large-scale facilities use a lot of electricity, the company’s electric provider also must sign off on the project, Rhodes said.