Saad Ullah
1800 Households
The state power company, Chernomorenergo RUE used its Facebook pageto make the announcement. According to the update, the company will be cutting power to 15 crypto mining farms. The total consumption of the farms come to an astounding 8,950 KWH. For comparison, this is the consumption of nearly 1,800 households in the country.
The cuts are not permanent, however. The power company said it had taken “temporary measures to limit the consumption of electricity by certain categories of subscribers.” The power outage has been accepted by the mining farms, saying that they understood the importance of the steps taken and are complying.
The compliance could also be partially motivated by the falling prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, making mining less profitable.
Global Power Concerns
In recent times, there has been a rising concern on the increasing power consumption of mining farms. Norway has already eliminated subsidiesit gave to mining farms. The Scandinavian country is famous for its cheap thermal energy and has been a favourite spot for the energy intensive farms. The decision was supported very by the Parliamentary Representative Lars Haltbrekken, who said, “Norway cannot continue to provide huge tax incentives for the most dirty form of cryptocurrency output […] [Bitcoin] requires a lot of energy and generates large greenhouse gas emissions globally.” The decision by the Norwegian government, unlike the Abkhazian, was met with a heavy criticism by the local industry.
2018 had been mostly bearish for cryptocurrencies, bringing the market leader Bitcoin to such low levels that many mining farms decided to shut down since they started to operate at losses.
Saad Ullah
