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".
1. I get that using ambient air is useful in many areas up north but I'm in Florida and there really is not much of an option other than to use traditional cooling methods. My temperatures were as high as about 99 degrees so I had to do something. I am currently only running 32 cards right now and I am now building the 4U rigs that you were describing in the 6 to 8 gpu variety. They do run much cooler on average than the open air rigs that I began mining with. I will move to a warehouse here in Florida due to me still having a year of military obligation left and that I have maxed out the power in my home. Mining has allowed me to match my military salary and I also just got my bachelor's as a backup plan should this all not work out so I feel fairly secure. My rates will decrease to around .085 kwh and warehouse space with 3 phase power is dirt cheap around me. I will probably add an additional 60-80 gpus when I move into a warehouse towards the end of the year. At any rate, I would consider making a move to your area in a few years if all goes well since low electricity rates do provide a certain level of stability should mining become less profitable in the future.
2. There are many many areas in the .04/.05 kwh range. Some of them are Niagara Falls, a dozen or so places in Idaho, and a few isolated places Nevada. That is just what I have found but I am sure there are other people here that could shed some light on their local rates.