At the end of February this year, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Development and Reform Commission issued the "Several Safeguard Measures on Ensuring the Completion of the 14th Five-Year Plan" Energy Consumption Dual Control Target Task (Draft for Comment)", proposing to comprehensively clean up and shut down virtual currency mining projects and withdraw all of them before the end of April, which has aroused the attention of public opinion, especially the currency circle. The "Economic Reference News" reporter visited relevant departments and enterprises and found that although the suspected "mining" projects have shifted, some big data projects are becoming high-energy-consuming industries.
Some "data centers" suspected of mining "mines"
In the currency circle, Inner Mongolia has many important national large "mines", but most league cities in the autonomous region do not recognize the existence of such projects. After the release of the above policy, there was a wave on the Internet, but the local wind and waves were calm. Although no conclusive mining projects were found in the interview, various information showed that the suspected "mining farm" and "mining machine" were being transferred from Inner Mongolia.
The reporter learned that there was a "mine" in a pastoral banner in central Inner Mongolia, so he went to visit. When the reporter went to the local area in early March to understand the situation, 2 of the 4 suspected companies had gone to the empty building, and 2 had stopped production on their own.
In the big data center of a technology company, there are six two-storey box-panel buildings with rows of computer racks empty. However, the "Economic Reference News" reporter found in the dormitory of the color steel room that there were still two stacks of computer chassis in the corner, and the iconic accessory of the miner, the high-performance graphics card packaging box, was piled up haphazardly. The only remaining security guard in the factory told reporters that there were more than 10,000 servers here, and there were usually six or seven people operating and maintaining, and a few days ago the company moved all the servers away, and heard that they were going to be shipped to Sichuan. The big data center of another technology company in the flag has its doors closed, but the words "ANTBOX" can still be seen on the building, which is the symbol of a practical mobile mine developed by Bitmain in March 2018, which can accommodate up to 324 S9 mining machines.
Two other companies, which are far from the flag location, have stopped production. According to him, the company only started trial production in November last year, equipped with 6,000 servers, never engaged in mining projects, and the suspension of production in these days was in response to the call to replace equipment with lower energy consumption, reduce the number of servers, and continue to do big data business.
The reporter learned from the Flag Development and Reform Bureau that the 4 enterprises are big data projects introduced by the merchants, as early as January, in order to complete the task of energy consumption control, the government required them to temporarily reduce electricity consumption, and the company's sense of smell is very sensitive, and it began to prepare for relocation and production stoppage. In the past, these enterprises have carried out rectification because they are more or less involved in mining, but now it seems that mining behavior is not really prohibited.
The reporter went to a famous city in central Inner Mongolia in the currency circle for an interview, and the relevant departments said that there have been no such projects in recent years. The reporter's network inquiry found that on January 25 this year, the UP master named "Cloud Computing Power Mining" released the relevant content of the local mine on the B station. The reporter contacted the UP main WeChat account to inquire about the situation, and the other party replied that the policy of Inner Mongolia is not the policy of the whole country, and the relocation can be done. But he was not in charge of the mine, and it was not clear whether the mine had been moved.
According to media reports, the Inner Mongolia mine owners they interviewed are preparing to relocate to the southwest province, and Inner Mongolia has comprehensively cleaned up the mining project, which may bring about a decline in computing power and an increase in the cost of mining custody in the short term, but in the context of the sharp rise in currency value, the cost of mining will not affect the enthusiasm of mine owners and miners.
Some big data projects have become big energy users
The reporter learned from the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Development and Reform Commission that the main purpose of introducing the above-mentioned new policy is to meet the standard of energy consumption double control, and since the "Thirteenth Five-Year Plan" energy consumption double control target has not been completed, Inner Mongolia is determined to achieve the target "from red to green" this year. Virtual currency mining projects have been resolutely cleaned up because they consume a lot of electricity, but rarely bring output value and employment.
The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index released by Cambridge University's Judge Business School shows that the annual electricity consumption of bitcoin mining in the world is about 127.48 terawatt hours, referring to the IEA (International Energy Agency) global power consumption ranking, bitcoin power consumption has exceeded more than 100 countries and regions, ranking about 29th in the world. The index also shows that in April 2020, China's hash rate (the unit of measurement of Bitcoin network processing power) accounted for 65.08% of the world, Xinjiang ranked first in China with 35%, and Sichuan and Inner Mongolia ranked second and third with 9.66% and 8.07% respectively.
A person in charge of the Inner Mongolia Department of Industry and Information Technology said that after the first two years of cleanup, it is estimated that the proportion of mines in Inner Mongolia will not exceed 20% in the country.
Grassroots departments reported that most of the mining projects are cloaked in data centers, which brings difficulties to supervision. "Enterprises disguise mining machines as ordinary servers, the appearance is difficult to find, generally need a certain amount of time, to find that its energy consumption and output value seriously mismatch, but it is not easy to obtain evidence, can only cancel its preferential electricity price." A cadre from the Autonomous Regional Development and Reform Commission said.
The reporter found that not only mining projects, even some real data centers, energy consumption is also quite large, big data projects are becoming a high-energy-consuming industry. The head of the data center energy-saving technical committee of the China Electronic Energy Conservation Technology Association has said that the power consumption of China's data centers has increased at a rate of more than 12% for eight consecutive years, and the total electricity consumption is expected to reach 296.2 billion kWh in 2020. According to this figure, the cumulative power generation capacity of the four cascade power stations of three gorges, Gezhouba, Xiluodu and Xiangjiaba in 2020 will be about 70 billion kWh.
In recent years, as a strategic emerging industry, the big data industry has been supported by local governments, especially in power-rich areas such as Inner Mongolia, where investment attraction is the main electricity price advantage card, and the preferential electricity price of the policy is as low as 0.26 yuan / kWh, attracting a large number of companies engaged in big data business.
Some Qixian have had to increase the electricity load in order to build new clean energy projects, and eventually introduce big data projects. Some responsible persons of relevant departments in QiXian county said that the reason for the introduction of data centers is to cooperate with the local construction of power grid demonstration projects with clean energy installed capacity, and the premise of project operation is that part of the electricity needs to be consumed locally. Since there is no large electricity load in the local area, only the introduction of big data projects can solve the problem.
Projects should not be rushed to the top should be both scientific and technological and energy consumption control
Some industry insiders said that areas like Inner Mongolia, which have a cold climate and rich power, do have the advantage of developing a big data industry, but due to the regional economy is not developed, there are few application scenarios, it is easy to become an energy consumption transfer place, increasing the pressure of local energy consumption dual control, affecting the energy consumption space of other industries.
In order to change the status quo of high energy consumption dependence on development, many people believe that the scale of data center construction should be controlled in a reasonable and orderly manner. In recent years, the importance of enterprises to data centers has increased significantly, and the signs of preemptive layout are obvious, like a city in Inner Mongolia that has reached 2.44 million units in just a few years, becoming the largest in the country. But the project construction is more, the use is less, last year only 70,000 servers were actually enabled, and the vacancy is serious.
At the same time, attention should be paid to resolving the contradiction between the separation of the data base and the headquarters economy. Encourage enterprises to increase local value-added applications when laying out data centers, and change the accounting method of the headquarters economy, transfer part of the output value to the data base, avoid dampening the enthusiasm of the local government of the data base, and also help reduce the pressure of local energy consumption control.
For local governments, it is more critical to treat big data industry projects in a classified manner. On the one hand, strengthen the supervision of the big data industry to prevent various mining projects from fishing in muddy waters with the appearance of the big data industry; on the other hand, change the policy of preferential treatment for the big data industry, increase energy consumption assessment, give preferential policies to big data application projects, and reduce or cancel preferential treatment for big data projects with high energy consumption and low application degree.
Some insiders suggest that enterprises can improve server efficacy in a timely manner. Li Shen, secretary of the board of directors of Inner Mongolia Zhonghong Amethyst Company, said that data storage follows the "law of two eight", enterprise-level servers are mostly disk arrays, once enabled, regardless of whether there is access must run day and night, a large amount of heat dissipation needs to be continuously cooled, resulting in waste of energy consumption. The company explores the development of optical media servers, using data hierarchical management and mixed storage of hot and cold data, and stores 80% of the rarely accessed cold data at room temperature of Blu-ray discs, which can effectively reduce energy consumption.
Source: Economic Reference Newspaper