Texas ushered in the fourth heat wave this summer, and households’ air-conditioning power consumption surged. Due to the expected shortage of energy reserves, the Texas power grid operator asked people to reduce electricity consumption. In addition, the cost of electricity continued to rise under the condition of tight power supply. Bit, as a large power consumer Mining farms can only be shut down to deal with emergencies.
The Electric Reliability Commission of Texas (ERCOT) on July 10 called on Texas residents and businesses to save electricity and predicted that the state’s electricity demand will set a record on Monday.
In anticipation that the Texas power grid will not be able to handle a large amount of electricity, many Texas mines have announced to reduce the scale of operations or simply suspend operations to avoid the collapse of the power supply system and the suspension of operation.
In a Twitter announcement on Monday, publicly traded cryptocurrency mining company Core Scientific said it has shut down all its Texas-based ASIC miners until further notice to ease the pressure on power supplies.
A spokesman for another cryptocurrency mining company, Riot Blockchain, said that its mine in the small Texas town of Rockdale has responded to ERCOT’s request to reduce electricity usage in the past few months; Argo Blockchain CEO Peter Wall pointed out, which has begun scaling back operations in Texas, noted that when ERCOT sounded the alarm, we all took it seriously and reduced mining operations. We did it again this afternoon, as did many of our mining peers.
According to “Bloomberg”, the chairman of the Texas Blockchain Association said that more than 1,000 megawatts (MW) of Bitcoin mining machine loads have been powered off, in line with the energy conservation requirements of Texas energy companies. Energy-saving measures could provide more than 1 percent offload reduction on the Texas grid, freeing that power for more critical retail and commercial use.
In this regard, analysts from the cryptocurrency research team MICA Research pointed out that the current Bitcoin hashrate network has not experienced a significant decline, and the data is still at an all-time high.
In June last year, the crackdown on bitcoin miners in mainland China prompted many miners to move to Texas, where electricity prices are cheap. What’s more, local political officials are very supportive of cryptocurrencies, which is a huge challenge for miners looking for friendly, cheap energy. Said to be a dream condition.
Post time: Sep-03-2022