Bitcoin miners in Texas curbed operations, crimping power usage, as a heat wave drove electricity prices sky-high Tuesday and threatened to cripple the grid in the second-largest US state. Kriti Gupta reports.
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Transcript
So it’s not just because you’re from the Big D that we brought you and you kind of spotted this story and how it links to crypto explain it to us yeah well every time I see it in the headlines my ears kind of perk up but as your
Resident Texan I’ll say that oh look this is really important because when you look at the Texas kind of power grid you think well this is just a simple function of the heat everyone turned the air conditioning on without power grid which by the way only Texas uses and
Some parts of Arkansas but like really only Texas also is the grid that a lot of Bitcoin miners use and it’s kind of been a function of this move towards doing mining off of Cheaper energy sources so you see this around the world and in parts of Siberia for example or
Kazakhstan or China where energy sources are incredibly cheap the same thing applies to places like Austin Texas for example but when everyone’s going to go use air conditioning and Mining at the same time the power good gets stretched and this is kind of something that we
Saw last year as well where summer heat wave came the power grid got stretched and Bitcoin mining actually fell the good news is in the winter when no one’s using AC in Texas these miners help keep these energy producers profitable right they’re a great customer yeah but when
The heat gets into triple digits and the grid is under threat the miners just stop mining Bitcoin right and the hash rate drops right and this is also a part of kind of the politics here as well because when you start to see the Texas regulator and a lot of politicians come
Out and say well we have to conserve energy and you see that on the consumer front on the business front as well even some people saying you shouldn’t be working from home because it would kind of uh help bring down the energy costs as well Bitcoin is going to be a part of
That story that being said I think what’s different this time around relative to 2022 is that those warnings and that encouragement of pulling the usage down in 2022 which ended up pulling mining down by about 18 in 2023 you haven’t had those warnings yet that being said it’s still only the end of
June we could still see that but I would say that’s perhaps the big difference
source
At no point of the story do they mention this is how the innovation works. The innovation of the tech is being able to shut off, immediately. The top energy consuming come from heating up (metal productions) and cooling (air conditioners & refrigeration) can not stop, nor restart on the drop of a dime. The agreement with energy producers is for in exchange for cheap rates we will be the greatest customer ever.
They need to go green or accept that they won't be able to continue mining
Using Limited resources to mine imaginary money. What a great use resources while their are people on this planet with no power. Do better humans