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From House Fire to Three-Phase: The Power Supply Evolution
How a Washington house fire pushed one farm to UL-certified power supplies, and why Alpha Miner says single-phase units have hit their ceiling.
A house fire in Upstate Washington is where Alpha Miner begins its story, and it was the opening of Michael Savuskan's keynote at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023, recorded July 25 to 27, 2023. Bitcoin was trading around $29,137 at the time. Today it is $83,316.
Savuskan, the chief executive of Alpha Miner, reminded the room that only a few years earlier, power supplies like the APW3 had a fixed 12 volt output and could run a Canaan or a Bitmain miner without caring which one. Then came the fire. He was working for a large industrial miner in Washington when a home miner with a poor setup burned down his own house and a couple of neighbors' homes. The city found it hard to go after a residence, so it went after the largest miners in the area. A fire inspector arrived with an ultimatum. In Savuskan's words, "we're gonna shut you down unless your power supplies have a UL certification which APW threes at the time did not have."
A certified unit in the United States cost about $350, and the farm ran 30,000 miners. Savuskan was asked to find a replacement, and he had the power supplies specified and produced in China at a fraction of that cost. Those units were named Alpha Miner, and that is how the company started. It still ships tens of thousands of those old supplies every year to places like Venezuela, where S9 miners run on cheap power.
The modern era, he said, began in November 2018 with the Bitmain S11, the first commercially produced miner with a variable-output power supply. As he put it, that "unleashed the era of a modern power supply where we have a variable output." Bitmain kept its supply independent from the miner, which is why aftermarket units exist for it. Canaan picked one supply and stuck with it across its 10 through 13 series. MicroBT updates power supply firmware together with the miner, and an unrecognized supply gets bricked, so there is no aftermarket for its machines.
Looking ahead, Savuskan was blunt: "single phase power supplies that we have right now are pretty much at their limit." Connectors top out at 20 amps, two of them give about 9,600 watts, and pushing higher adds harmonics and noise to the network. The way up is three-phase, "connecting the miners 350 480 520 volts whatever the power grid you have." That could reach 20,000 watts. Converting an existing farm is expensive, he admitted, but a new farm built three-phase from the start saves on transformers.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.