Geoff Morphy: Thanks, Kevin. Lots of good content there. So Argentina. Argentina has turned out to be quite an opportunity for us. Like that $0.021 contract that we fixed for six months in November, which represents the summer time in Argentina, was certainly a coup for us and really illustrates the exciting potential for Argentina in terms of low cost. They have all this shut in natural gas and to be able to monetize it, because it’s not really able to push it into a pipeline and send it to other countries. They don’t have an LNG port, so it’s there. And we’ve now got a government there, the Malay government, that is pro-business, that wants to reduce government bureaucracy and really transform the country. And it’s exactly what is really, frankly, needed there.
They’ve been plagued with high inflation for a lot of years, and it needs this type of corrective action. So about a year ago, we made the strategic decision to take our Rio Cuarto place and stop at one warehouse, at least for the time being. We’ve got that 210 megawatt contract. It’s there. And we think that things are starting to settle out in Argentina and give us the confidence that we might be able to invest again. So there’s that location, and frankly, there’s other locations in Argentina too, that are very attractive and might actually offer a lower cost solution than what we have in Rio Cuarto. But Rio Cuarto is one that we’ve developed it. We’ve got a substation that’s able to basically supply at least one more warehouse. We’ve got government approvals that could allow us for one more warehouse.
So that’s some of the dry powder we have. But as stewards of capital, we need to be prudent. And when we went through that government change, we just didn’t know. So we decided to take our foot off the pedal, relax. We found alternative opportunities in Paraguay that are completely green, and we’re building that out. But certainly, Argentina represents a very attractive opportunity, especially at these prices for later this year, next year and beyond. So very exciting.
Kevin Dede: Can we talk a little bit about your commentary regarding Paraguay? I understood your comments too, I guess, imply that you are not subject to curtailment restrictions. And I’m wondering how you think about that longer term and any recourse you might have in dealing with ANDE, should they decide that they’re going to need that power that they’ve allocated to you.
Geoff Morphy: Okay. Well, ANDE, we’ve got a very open dialogue on the go with. And our first contract for the 10 megawatt facility with a private company on a private franchise called CLYFSA. And there is some curtailment there because of infrastructure issues. And we get an adjustment to our power rate there. With ANDE, though, we’ve — it’s more robust contracts, they’re bigger. We’ve located very close to their high voltage substations. And they have carefully allocated megawatts to the crypto mining sector. They haven’t overdone it. They haven’t put it in — put themselves into a position where they’re going to be short on power. They’ve been very conservative. So the ANDE contracts are not subject to curtailment unless there’s an emergency situation.
But these guys have these two large hydro power projects, including the Itaipu dam that is producing a lot of power. And Paraguay gets a significant amount of that power and a significant of that — amount of that power then gets sold back to Brazil or at least sold to Brazil on a wholesale basis because they have no place to put it. I have never heard of ANDE not having enough power, but they have had infrastructure constraints, which they are solving through upgrading their high voltage lines, their high voltage corridors, their substations. And the one in Paso Pe and Villarrica is strong. It’s been there for a few years, and there’s abundant power there. The one in Yguazu is recently constructed. It’s 1.2 gigawatts. They’ve got 500 KV high voltage lines leading into it, and we don’t expect, it’s also closer to the Itaipu dam, so the electrons have shorter distance to go.
But we just don’t expect the curtailment to be there unless there’s really these emergency conditions, which are — would be highly unusual. So it’s one of the things we very much like about Paraguay is being able to operate our miners 24/7 around the clock. There’s heat there. And we’ve — and since we’ve operated there for a couple of years, we know how to deal with that heat. So I expect that the exahash that we’ll be adding this year in Paraguay, especially with the T21 and the hydros are — we’re going to get a lot of active, ongoing production coming out of that country. We’re — it’s a solid place to do business.
Kevin Dede: Okay. Just a couple of detailed infrastructure questions. One, Paso Pe, 70 megawatts. I understand that you have all the heavy duty equipment, the substations. I’m just wondering if you have anything running there? What’s actually on site now?
Geoff Morphy: I can add to this, but Ben, why don’t you — as Chief Mining — why don’t you answer this question?
Ben Gagnon: Sure. Thanks to take that question, Kevin. Right now what we have is we’ve got basically three buildings which are up, and we are deploying our first MicroBT hydro miners. So those hydro miners are going to be online this month. And next month with these buildings and the T21s, we are going to be deploying T21s in April. So a little bit of a phased deployment. First miners coming online this month are going to be the MicroBT hydros, and next month we are going to be deploying T21s.
Kevin Dede: So, Ben, are any of the hydros running now? What’s sort of your immediate takeaway? And how do you see operating the operating requirements there versus air-cooled? I’m wondering, there’s been a lot of chatter in the industry about using immersion to defray operating costs, and I’m wondering if you’ve had any touch on that with this deployment so far.
