Limiting crypto helped power grid weather a heat wave
As a blistering heat wave smothered Texas this week and taxed the power grid with record-high demand, bitcoin mining operators in the state shut down their electricity-guzzling machines.
Complying with requests from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas — the grid operator that asked businesses and residents to voluntarily conserve electricity during the heat wave — nearly all industrial-scale mining in the state reportedly powered down, according to the Texas Blockchain Council, an industry association.
Cryptocurrency mining requires huge amounts of electricity, prompting concerns not only around whether Texas’s beleaguered grid can keep up with skyrocketing demand as more miners are expected to flock to the state, but also over the industry’s broader potential environmental impact.
“There are over 1,000 megawatts worth of bitcoin mining load that responded to ERCOT’s conservation request by turning off their machines to conserve energy for the grid,” Lee Bratcher, president of Texas Blockchain Council, told Bloomberg News in an email.
The result? More than 1 percent of the state’s total grid capacity was freed up, Bratcher wrote.
While that ordinarily may not seem like much, it can matter during times of peak demand, said Joshua D. Rhodes, a research associate with the Webber Energy Group at the University of Texas at Austin. When an electricity grid is “within a few thousand megawatts of how much supply we have and how much demand we have, a 1 percent change can make a big difference,” said Rhodes, who has consulted for cryptocurrency mining companies.
“When we’re running out of supply, reducing demand is very helpful in that context,” he said.
But, Rhodes noted, the action wasn’t a “silver bullet” for electricity concerns. “I don’t think it single-handedly saved” the grid, he said. “It was part of a suite of actions across energy consumers that helped keep the grid stable.”
In recent years, Texas has become one of the go-to locations for crypto entrepreneurs. To date, approximately 10 facilities have connected and there is more than “27 gigawatts of crypto load that is working on interconnecting over the next four years,” ERCOT said in a statement to the Washington Post.
Around the world, the cryptocurrency industry’s massive carbon footprint has drawn increasing scrutiny. The commonly used method of extracting coins involves huge amounts of computing power. Networks of miners have to use processors to solve complex puzzles to earn coins as well as track and verify transactions — all of which consumes energy.
A 2019 study estimated that bitcoin, one of the most popular cryptocurrencies, emitted between 22 and 29 million metric tons of carbon dioxide during the previous year, according to findings published in the peer-reviewed journal Joule.
“This means that the emissions produced by bitcoin sit between the levels produced by the nations of Jordan and Sri Lanka,” the study’s authors wrote.