WEST ALTON, Illinois — In farmland near the banks of the Mississippi River, the state's largest electric utility has stuffed a shipping container full of high-powered computers, in the shadow of one of its coal-fired power plants.
The project, launched quietly this year at Ameren Corp.'s Sioux Energy Center here, is a controversial experiment: Ameren built the data center to guzzle energy from the electric grid and help its power plants avoid ramping their production down and back up again, which wastes energy and stresses the plants.
But the company needed something for the computers to work on. So Ameren devised a task for the servers: "Mine" for Bitcoin, the polarizing digital currency now on a Wall Street tear.
