1. Even with the traditional costs of air conditioning, I am currently making huge profits as I don't mine with ASICS but rather GPU rigs. ASICS are largely not that profitable now and thus that is why people have to resort to such cooling practices. I can tell you that when I made the switch to having dedicated air conditioning my hashrates went up a good 10% and my gpu fans don't have to run ragged. Just to clarify I don't keep it at 68 degrees as most data centers now keep it around 77-79 to lessen electricity consumption. I will have to now amend my cooling costs to being more in the range of 25-30% but to me it is worth it for the stability and sustainability.
3.I agree with you in regards to the rates. I know about the local rates as well but it was just to prove a simple point. Even though they have not increased the rates dramatically it is a reasonably good bet that rates will continue to rise as consumption in that area increases. However, there are still some low profile areas in other parts of the country that are in the .04/.05 kwh range.
1. 30% is a lot closer on traditional A/C - SEER 10 would work out to about 33% if you have ZERO ventilation at all - but most places you can manage to get to 80 F for a LOT of the year with no more than good ventilation.
To quote from one of the articles I've read about Yahoo's Chicken Coop design, though:
"Yahoo engineers determined that YCC yielded roughly two percent annualized cost to cool with evaporative cooling; meaning that free-cooling would have an even lower percentage. (cost to cool is the energy (kW) expended to remove the heat generated by the data center load as a percentage of the data center load itself.)"
Their setup uses standard rack mount cases, though, but it uses the fans IN THE CASES to do all of the air moving - I suspect their actual total COUNTING those fans would be under 10%.
They use a "flash evap" misting type setup, not traditional "aspen" or "rigid" media style evap cooling, which also would keep their costs down - and this IS in a building custom-designed and built for this work.
3. no doubt rates will rise - but with the AMOUNT of hydropower available, and the ability to bump "for sale" rates up even more, local rates shouldn't go up very fast.
This year's increase in the county I'm in was 2.1% or LESS for most classes, though the lower level of "Industrial" got tagged for a 5% jump - but the higher level of industrial got tagged for less than 1%.
Most folks in the Electric industry still use a "one household averages 10KW" estimate - you might think that should have gone up over time, but it gets dropped due to a lot more folks being "single" and therefore the average household size has been dropping for a long time, which evens that estimate out.
Rough ballpark 50k pop each in Chelan and Grant counties = 500 Megawatt local usage each (ballpark), probably add that much more at MOST for local business usage (not a lot of manufacturing in this area so that estimate is likely VERY high) - and you're up to about HALF the available Hydropower in each county from it's dams on what should be a rather pessimistic estimate of local usage.
Douglas ends up at pretty close to the same, since it's pop is a LOT lower.
Area pop also isn't growing very fast, nor is there any real reason for it to do so.
I've seen a very FEW other areas that can get to 5c/kwh on industrial rates, but haven't really looked all THAT hard as I'm already in the "optimal area".