Drawn to Montana’s cold, dry weather that would aid in naturally cooling thousands of servers, Barnard assisted CryptoWatt in its goal to operate 300 MW of Bitcoin mining data centers across the State.

CryptoWatt contracted Barnard to expand and upgrade their existing MSE substation in Butte, Montana, in order to power the increased load of the Bitcoin mining servers. The project involved a multi-phased substation expansion (161kV-13.8kV, 133 MW Substation), associated protection equipment, and medium voltage (13.8 kV) overhead distribution to the buildings around the site, all completed while coordinating with the associated Utility (NorthWestern Energy). The phasing of the project allowed operations to continue off the existing substation with only a brief cut over outage to energize each of the expansion phases. The work was completed safely and on-time under an accelerated schedule so that mining operations could begin as soon as possible.